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A Tory can rise no higher than the assumption of a question. If he relied on any thing But custom and authority, he would cease to be a Tory. He has a prejudice in favour of certain things, and against certain persons. This is all he knows of the matter. He therefore gives you assertions for argument, and abuse for wit. If you ask a re reason for his opinions, he calls you names; and if you why he does so, he proves that he is in the right, by repeating them a thousand times. A nickname is with him the test of truth. It vents his spleen, strengthens his own prejudices, and communicates them mechanically to his hearers.ost visos e

od 2911sadt ads to smoe teds laidow efnave Ile A.Ji to foolgen The When an Elector of Hanover Adi has oloriage, ef eesniaud made into a King of England, what does he become in t the course of a century?-A George the Fourth.

LVIII.

The taste of the Great in pictures is singular, but not unaccountable. The King is said to prefer the Dutch to the Italian School of painting; and if you hint your surprise at this, you are looked upon as a very Gothic and outré sort of person. You are told, however, by way of consolation" To be sure, there is Lord Carlisle likes an Italtan picture-Mr. Holwell Carr likes an Italian picture the Marquis of Staf ford is fond of an Italian picture-Sir George Beaumont likes an Italian picture!"-These, notwithstanding, are regarded as quaint and daring exceptions to the established rule; and their preference is a species of lese-majesté in the Fine Arts, as great an eccentricity and want of fashionable etiquette, as if any gentleman or nobleman still preferred old claret to new, when the King is known to have changed his mind this subject, or was guilty of the offence of dipping his fore-finger and thumb in the middle of a snuff-box, instead of gradually approxi mating nating the contents t contents to the edge of the box, according to the most ap proved models. One would imagine that the great and exaltedin station would like lofty subjects in works of art, whereas they seem to have an exclusive predilection for the mean and mechanical. One would think those whose word is law, would be pleased with the great and striking effects of the pencil on the contrary, they admire nothing but the little and elaborate. They have a fondness for cabinet or furniture pictures, and a proportionable antipathy to works of 3dquodt sd blow ti adal. TodoƆ IM 100th 2 s The Duke of Wellington, it is said, cannot enter into the merits of Raphael, buta he admires the spirit and fire Tintoret" I do not wonder at this bias

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sentiment, probably, never
er dawned of

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upon his Grace's mind;

to felish the dashing execution and hit or miss mermer of; but he may be supposed Raphaet! well is it that it was one who did not understand thee, that blundered upon the destruction of humanity!

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genius. Even arts with them must be servile, to be tolerated. Perhaps the seeming contradiction may be thus explained. These persons are raised so high above the rest of the species, that the more violent and agitating pursuits of mankind appear to them like the turmoil of ants on a mole-hill. Nothing interests them but their own pride and self-importance. Our passions are to them an impertinence; an expression of high sentiment they rather shrink from as a ludicrous and upstart assumption of equality. They, therefore, like what glitters to the eye, what is smooth to the touch; but they shun, by an instinct of Sovereign taste, whatever has a soul in it, and implies a reciprocity of feeling. The gods of the earth can have no interest in anything human; they are cut off from all sympathy with "the bosoms and businesses of men." Instead of requiring to be wound up beyond their habitual feeling of stately dignity, they wished to have the springs of our strained pretension let down, to be relaxed with "trifles light as air," to be amused with the familiar and frivolous, and to have the world appear a scene of still life, except as they disturb it! The little in thought and internal sentiment is a necessary relief and set off to the oppressive sense of external magnificence. Hence Kings babble and repeat they know not what. A childish dotage often accompanies the consciousness of absolute power. Repose is somewhere necessary, and the soul sleeps, while the senses gloat around. Besides, the mechanical and high-finished style of art may be considered as something done to order. It is a task to be executed more or less perfectly, according stos the price given and the industry of the artist. We stand by, as it were, see the work done, insist upon a greater degree of neatness and accuracy, and exercise a sort of petty, jealous jurisdiction over each particular. We are judges of the minuteness of the details, and though ever so nicely executed, as they give us no ideas beyond what they had before, we do not feel humbled in the comparison. The artisan scarcely rises into the artist; and the name of genius is degraded, rather than exalted in his person. The performance is so far ours that we have paid for it, and the highest price is all that is necessary to produce the highest finishing. But it is not so in works of genius and imagination. Their price is above rubies. The inspiration of the Muse comes not with the fiat of a monarch, with the donation of a patron; and theredfore the Great turn with disgust or effeminate indifference from the Jemighty masters of the Italian school, because such works baffle and confound their self-will, and make them feel that there is something in enthe mind of man which they can neither give nor take away. & 16 {* “ Quam nihil ad tuum, Papinane, ingenium !”

M

LIX.

The style of conversation in request in courts proceeds much upon the same principle. It is low, and it is little. I have known a few persons who have had access to the Presence (and who might be supposed to catch what they could of the tone of royalty at second-hand, bating

the dignity-God knows there was nothing of that!) and I should say they were the highest finishers in this respect I ever met with No

91 circumstance escaped them, they worked out all the details (whether to the purpose or not) like a facsimile, they mimicked every things explained every thing, the story was not told, but acted over again. It is true, there were no grandes pensées, there was a complete truce with

all thought and reflection but they were everlasting dealers in matters of fact, and there was no end of their minute prolixityone must sup3-pose this mode pleased their betters, or was copied from them. Dogberry's declaration" Were. I as tedious as a king, I could find in my. heart to bestow it all upon your worship" is not perhaps so much a blunder of the clown's, as a sarcasm of the poet's. Are we to account for the effect (as before) from supposing that their overstrained attention to great things makes them seek for a change in little ones? Or that their idea of themselves as raised above every one else is confirmed by dwelling on the meanest and most insignificant objects? Or is it that from their ignorance and seclusion from the world, every thing is alike new and wonderful to them? Or that dreading the insincerity of those about them, they exact an extraordinary degree of trifling accuracy, and require every one to tell a story, as if he was giving evidence on oath before a court of justice? West said that the late King used to get him up into a corner, and fairly put his hands before him so that he could not get away, till he had got every particular out of him relating to the affairs of the Royal Academy. This weakness in the mind of kings has been well insisted on by Peter Pindar. It is of course like one of the spots in the sun.

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atomog - barbietoj TABLE TALK.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS It was reported of this eeminent painter, that he shared with his man Ralph in the money which the latter received on showing his pictures. In allusion too this rumour, Dr. Farmer once happily quoted the lines from Hudibras, bus osto) £

There are certain tasks which are peculiarly inappropriate to the leviathans of learning. Bentley made sad work with Milton, and Warburton's Shakespeare was a miserable affair. Quin's observation on the publication of the latter was pleasant and correct. "He ought to have stuck to his own Bible, and not have meddled with ours."

It is a great mistake to suppose that a philosophical spirit is in direct contradistinction to an imaginative one. On the contrary, the highest order of thinkers and discoverers, such as Bacon, Newton, and Leibnitz, are mainly indebted to the imaginative faculty. A case in point: The latter, when occupied in his philosophical reasonings on his "Law of Continuity," his singular sagacity enabled him to predict a discovery which was afterwards realized, he imagined the necessary existence of a polypus. The supposition of Columbus in regard to the existence of a Western Continent, was also imaginative.

མ་ ་

biroWhen custom was urged in favour of some abuses which the Chancellor Audley wished to put down, he replied, "The usage hath been of to rob at Shooter's-hill; is it therefore lawful?" We are not quite sure that Mr. Bankes would not reply, Yes. He certainly would, as to some sort of Gadshill people. In Ireland, thousands of interested peopaple brawlean affirmative every dayaq tobong pu ergw exadt ‚erm zi

In the Russian language, the terms beautiful, red, and coloured, are all three represented by the same word. Was a consequent confusion in the head of the unhappy Paul the cause of his erecting that absurdity, his red palace?

The modern chivalry, which so exalts the female, has seldom, even in manners, extended to the monarch, at least out of France. A billet-doux of the Emperor Charles V. is preserved in the last page of an illuminated prayer-book in the Imperial library at Vienna, which was a gift from that sovereign to his mistress. It thus gallantly concludes, “Je suis votre bon maitre, CHARLES QUINT.”

IMMORTALITY.
LIFE is eternal thought;
Think ye the womb
Can be the primal stage
Of a Spirit's doom?

There is life forgotten,

This life before

And the life that cometh after
We leave the world's shore.

From Godhead to Angel,

From man to the fly,

Burns the fire of intelligence :-
Nothing can die.

All are expanding lights,
Nor the Deity

Doth a single star of that host;
To darkness decree.

Death is an idle name

It is but change,

Or the draught of oblivion,

That maketh things strange.

We are a part of God,

And ever must be ;

This simile of the soul approaching perfection through all Eternity, but, likend 19 that mathematical line which pursues but never unites with another, ever distanta from its gaol, is to be found in the writings of Addison.

LONDON:-Published by HENRY L. HUNT, 38, Tavistock-street, Covent-garden, and 22, Bond-street. Price Fourpence; or, if stamped for country circulation free of postage, Sevenpence. Sold by all Booksellers and Newsvenders in town; and by the following Agents in the country:

Matins and Vespers, with Hymns and Occasional Devotional Pieces. By John Bowring.

Ir we study human character and the mind of man, we shall find the great leading mental distinctions more reducible to classification than might be at first imagined. No doubt, as we approach the individual, in the scale of descent the varieties are perplexing and numerous; but it is surprising how many of these may be legitimately marshalled under a few general indications of taste, temperament, and predisposition. Hume, without attempting any thing very profound or systematic on the subject, has supplied very elegant sketches of four grand characteristic tendencies, under the respective denominations of the STOIC, or man of lofty and determined moral rectitude; the SCEPTIC, or subtle, acute, and investigative inquirer; the EPICUREAN, or votary of elegant and refined self-enjoyment; and the PLATONIST, or tender and devotional contemplatist. Hume, in adopting these Grecian distinctions, by no means confined himself to the mere learned acceptation of them, but borrowed the terms, because the associations connected with them might assist a more general application. We refer to them with a similar restriction; to which we may add, that however debased and vulgarised by ignorance or unfavourable circumstances, one of these dispositions of the Grecian schools is traceable in nearly every individual. What stage of life will not exhibit a sense of the dignity of moral self-estimation,-display a restless, curious, and disputatious“ * spirit of enquiry,a disposition to self enjoyment, which, however guarded, is always on the brink of the Circean cup, and too often aknað slave to it, and lastly, a warm and devotional enthusiasm, which creates a pillow for the soul out of the "evidence of things unseen,' to an eternal sentiment of contemplative adoration,—no

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and excitesarse the materials of the pillow aforesaid, or how vague,

matter how inadequate, or even monstrous, the idea of the object adored. The poor savage, who is particularly disposed to see God in clouds, or hear him in the wind," in his mental constitution is not very materially distinguished from the sentimental devotee, whose fancy is replete with sublime and beautiful images, and whose soul, abounding with lofty and eloquent aspirations, soars among the most distinguished of the spirits whose essence, as Emanuel Swedenburgh might say, is Love. YOL. I.

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