over Europe, which, a few ages since, were only to be found on the coasts of the Mediterranean; and this notwithstanding the mad wars continually raging, by which are often destroyed, in one year, the works of many years' peace; so that we may hope the luxury of a few merchants on the coast will not be the ruin of America.

One reflection more, and I will end this long rambling paper. Almost all parts of our bodies require some expense; the feet demand shoes; the legs, stockings; the rest of the body clothing; and the stomach a good deal of victuals. Our eyes, though exceedingly useful, ask, when reasonable, only the cheap assistance of spectacles, which could not much impair our finances. But the eyes of other people are the eyes that ruin us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine clothes, fine houses, nor fine furniture.

EXTRACT XIX.

The Influence of professional Associations, on the sense of Beauty. REV. DR. ALISON.

No man, in general, is sensible to beauty in those subjects with regard to which he has not previous ideas. The beauty of a theory, or of a relic of antiquity, is unintelligible to a peasant. The charms of the country are altogether lost upon a citizen who has passed his life in town. In the same manner, the more that our ideas are increased, or our conceptions extended, upon any subject, the greater the number of associations we connect with it, the stronger is the emotion of sublimity or beauty we receive from it.

The pleasure, for instance, which the generality

of mankind receive from any celebrated painting, is trifling, when compared to that which a painter feels, if he is a man of any common degree of candor. What is to them only an accurate representation of nature, is to him a beautiful exertion of genius, and a perfect display of art. The difficulties which occur to his mind in the design and execution of such a performance, and the testimonies of skill, of taste, and of invention, which the accomplishment of it exhibits, excite a variety of emotions in his breast, of which the common spectator is altogether unsusceptible; and the admiration with which he thus contemplates the genius and art of the painter, blends itself with the peculiar emotions which the picture itself can produce, and enhances to him every beauty that it may possess.

The beauty of any scene in nature, is seldom so striking to others as it is to a landscape-painter, or to those who profess the beautiful art of laying out grounds. The difficulties both of invention and execution, which from their professions are familiar to them, render the profusion with which nature often scatters the most picturesque beauties, little less than miraculous. Every little circumstance of form and perspective, and light and shade, which is unnoticed. by a common eye, is important in theirs, and, mingling in their minds the ideas of difficulty and facility n overcoming it, produces altogether an emotion of delight, incomparably more animated than any that the generality of mankind usually derive from it.

The delight which most men of education receive from the consideration of antiquity, and the beauty that they discover in every object which is connected with ancient times, is, in a great measure, to be ascribed to the same cause. The antiquarian, in his cabinet, surrounded by the relics of former ages, seems to himself to be removed to periods that are long since past, and indulges in the imagination of

living in a world which, by a very natural kind of prejudice, we are always willing to believe was both wiser and better than the present. All that is venerable or laudable in the history of those times, presents itself to his memory. The gallantry, the heroism, the patriotism of antiquity, rise again before his view, softened by the obscurity in which they are involved, and rendered more seducing to the imagination by that obscurity itself, which, while it mingles a sentiment of regret amid his pursuits, serves, at the same time, to stimulate his fancy to fill up, by its own creation, those long intervals of time of which history has preserved no record. The relics he contemplates seem to approach him still nearer to the ages of his regard. The dress, the furniture, the arms of the times, are so many assistances to his imagination, in guiding or directing its exercise, and, offering him a thousand sources of imagery, provide him with an almost inexhaustible field in which his memory and his fancy may expatiate. There are few men who have not felt somewhat, at least, of the delight of such an employment. There is no man in the least acquainted with the history of antiquity, who does not love to let his imagination loose on the prospect of its remains, and to whom they are not, in some measure, sacred, from the innumerable images which they bring. Even the peasant, whose knowledge of former times extends but to a few generations, has yet, in his village, some monument of the deeds or virtues of his forefathers; and cherishes with a fond veneration the memorial of those good old times to which his imagination returns with delight, and of which he loves to recount the simple tales that tradition has brought him.

And what is it that constitutes that emotion of sublime delight, which every man of common sensibility feels upon the first prospect of Rome? It is not the scene of destruction which is before him.

It is not the Tiber, diminished in his imagination to a paltry stream, and stagnating amid the ruins of that magnificence which it once adorned. It is not the triumph of superstition over the wreck of human greatness, and its monuments erected upon the very spot where the first honors of humanity have been gained. It is ancient Rome which fills his imagination. It is the country of Cæsar, and Cicero, and Virgil, which is before him. It is the mistress of the world which he sees, and who seems to him to rise again from her tomb, to give laws to the universe. All that the labors of his youth, or the studies of his maturer age have acquired, with regard to the history of this great people, opens at once before his imagination, and presents him with a field of high and solemn imagery, which can never be exhausted. Take from him these associations, conceal from him that it is Rome that he sees, and how different would be his emotion!

EXTRACT XX.

The Beauty of the Human Form. REV. DR. ALISON.

The human form is not a simple form. It is a complicated frame composed of many parts, in which some relation of these parts is required by every eye, and from which relation, beauty or deformity is the actual and experienced result. If the positive beauty of the human form arises, in all various and different cases, from its expression of character of mind, then it ought to follow, that the beauty of composition in this complicated form, ought, as in all other cases of composition, to arise from the preservation of unity of character; that no forms or proportions ought to be felt as beautiful, but those which accord

with this central expression, and that different forms and different proportions ought to be felt as beautiful, whenever they are significant of the characters we wish and expect. If these are found to be facts, I apprehend it will not only be sufficient to show the real origin of the beauty of form, but to establish some more definite conceptions, with regard to the nature of the beauty we experience in these relations of the parts of the human form.

That the beauty of composition in the form of man, is determined by this unity of character or expression, or, in other words, that the principle by which we judge of the beauty of any member or members of the form, is that of their correspondence to the general expression, is a proposition which seems very consistent with common experience. Every form which we remark for beauty, has always some specific character which is the foundation of our admiration. It is either manly, or gallant, or majestic, or dignified; or feminine, or gentle, or modest, or delicate: as such we feel, and as such we describe it. It seldom happens, however, in actual life, that any form of this kind appears to us in which we are not conscious of some defect,- of some limb or member being unsuitable to the rest, and affecting us with some sense of pain or dissatisfaction. If we ask ourselves what is the reason of our disapprobation, or if we attend to the language of others, we shall find, I think, that it is always resolvable into the want of correspondent expression, and that the imaginary attempts we make to rectify it, consist in new-modelling the faulty members, so as to accord with this expression. It is painful to us, thus, to see a form of general delicacy with any strong muscular limb, to see a bust of manliness or strength, with limbs either short or attenuated, or limbs of great strength and vigor, with a thin and hectic form of body. In representations of the form of woman, it