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would have been lessened, and it would have looked as blank as a huge frame out of which one of Raphael's divinest productions had been cut. Your correspondent may however turn round on me with the assurance that he intended not to present this empty Doric cup to the thirsty lips of his 'countrymen-that he wished to fill it brimful, not with a heathen but a Christian spring, or to drop metaphor, that he felt his Doric temple was imperfect without the powerful and necessary aid of sculpture; but even should he feel and express all this, the unblushing adoption of the Athenian temple will avail him little. Certainly he does not mean to press Theseus, and Illisus, and Minerva, and the Centaurs, and the naked youths of Attica, into the service of the Kirk of Scotland. Still should he push them from their stools, he must select some other beings to succeed them-some designs must be sought for in which British glory and Christianity has a share and here he embarks in an ocean of expense, and what will alarm him as much, a call will be made for original designs, unless with the same love of imitation as in the building, he advises us to transfer the cartoons of Raphael to our walls, cut out in good gray stone, and as these will by no means go round them, call in Reubens and Michael Angelo as auxiliaries. Should he, however, have the weakness to wish for sculptural designs-illustrating Scottish glory-expressing the original character of the nation-and commemorating us in every point of our fame as warriors, patriots, poets, divines, philosophers, and so on, he must not hope to conjure them up by an article in your Magazine, or extract them like a new made Parthenon from the portfolio of good master what's-his-name. They must be the fruit of much meditation, the unwearied labour of years, and what is more, they will devour all your correspondent's original sum of £40,000. The simple stateliness of the Doric was enriched by the sculpture the massive plainness of the pediments and extensive friezes was adorned, while concealed by the splendour of historical enrichment-without sculpture it will be inferior to its prototype, and will no more have the effect of the Parthenon than a prentices cap will look like a bonnet of gold sparkling with precious stones,

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A reluctance is expressed at remov ing that tall round-I cannot find a a name for it-called Nelson's Monument. Who, in the name of taste, considers that inelegant and unmeaning mass an ornament? yet it expresses the national admiration of our naval hero as visibly and sensibly as the column of Antonine without sculpture, can ever be compelled to do. I cannot help wondering at the sweeping wholesale manner of your correspondent; he casts down Admiral Nelson's windmill, but he atones for disturbing this laboured quarry above ground, by proposing to impress a soldier into the sea service—to seize the column of the divine Antonine, and compel it to acknowledge, in the streets of Edinburgh, the glory of Alexandria and Trafalgar. How will he accomplish thisumn, though it reaches the clouds, means nothing of itself-the columns of Trajan and Antonine were the mere vehicles of sculpture; the pegs on which history hung her achievements. Deprive them of their sculpture, and they are columns to any one's fame. Here, again, your correspondent forgets the principle and exalts the auxiliary-tells the value of the picture frame, and forgets that of the picture. Now he has filled the Calton Hill and St Andrew's Square with the cumbrous splendour of two unadorned edifices two Samsons shorn of their locks of strength-this he calls rivalling Athens and Rome. Having accomplished this, what does he propose to do-to consecrate the temple of Minerva, and turn her niche into a pulpit? And here he seems sensible that the genius of the age must have something conceded to appease it; and the compliment he pays Messrs Elliot and Playfair is a dexterous one-a stab under the fifth rib. "Here (says he) here is a square, two hundred feet long and sixty feet high, for your genius to revel in-there is nothing to prevent your fancy and taste from running east, and west, and north, and south, but stone walls, and nothing to curb you over head but a stone arch. (At what period did the Greeks arch their temples?) And there is an ample field for exerting yourselves; I have given the smoky and dirty exterior to Phidias; but the interior, the glorious interior, I have reserved for you-let your genius be measured with the genius of antiquity, and let the victor

bear off the prize." Really I would give tenpence, for I am miserably poor, to know the name of the man who wrote this. He crowns Phidias king of infinite space, and confines Elliot and Playfair in an augre's bore and this he calls rivalry-a fair free field for rivalry; by this he proposes to arouse the free spirit of genius and truly it deserves never to rise, unless, like the strong man in scripture, it starts up and snaps the bonds with which it is now proposed to constrain it. "And if (saith the same inspired authority) by thus giving you the interior, we secure to you the victory, and you outrival the exterior by Phidias, we will rejoice at the triumph of modern over ancient art." And so thou mayest, thou fair

est of all architectural critics. When a fish learns to swim with fins of lead, an eagle to soar with shorn wings, and a man to outstrip the deer in fleetness, with two half hundred weight, or a Number of Constable's Magazine at each heel, then may you hope that genius will most curiously adapt its original feelings to the line and the level of other men-seize on their unfinished works with all the fervour of new and unabated thought-warm itself up to the same temper with which the original design was conceivedand, conjured into the magic circle of Phidias, drudge at his behests with a visible and impassable limit before it, and rest amid the terrors of the sor◄ cerer's wand.

A JOURNEYMAN MASON.

ON THE ANALOGY BETWEEN THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUAL AND NATIONAL GENIUS.

exerted-a sympathy of no ordinary moment. If we consider what the high exertion of those faculties must be, we shall perceive that the subject of our regard is nothing less than a spiritual agent in freedom of its power, satisfying its own native desires out of the means which its union with life may yield it; for life is different to every mind, according to its own constitution-to that of the bodily frame in which it breathes and feels, and to the thousand-fold contingencies which make up to it the circumstances and course of the individual being. whatever is thus brought into the soul of pleasure and of pain ;-whatever the affections of the mind, modified, as they thus are, into peculiar character;

THERE is a natural inclination in men's minds to wish that the impulses under which the genius of a people acts, should be derived essentially from their own mind; and many may have experienced the feeling who scarcely recognise it in formal enunciation; for undoubtedly there is a very general and deep-felt admiration of those works of genius in every kind, which bear impressed on them the character of the people among whom they have arisen, and which seem native, as it were, to their soil. There is felt, in like manner, a certain repulsive chillness investing those works of art, which, though elaborate and fair, are imitated merely from the art of another nation. They want natural interest; and they always give back the impres--whatever the sense and the intellision of a timid genius, which will rather forego the pleasure and pride of its inherent power, than risk the peril of relying upon it. There is a reproach that lies even on the imitator's name, in which all sympathize, though they may have taken no account with themselves of the feeling in which they participate.

This natural impression, which allows so much virtue to the workings of a native spirit in the breast of genius, may be itself of more virtue than we are apt to conceive. It is a just and true sympathy in common men, with that condition of the mind in which its highest faculties are best

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gence, thus moulded or endowed for peculiar discernment, may gather up from the world of life, for joy or sorrow-for delight and awe-for knowledge infinitely diversified-for selfspringing conceptions of unsleeping thought;-whatever life itself, by its beauty, powers, destinies--its passions, hopes, privileges-its multiplied relations and ceaseless change can yield to the intellectual and sensitive soul for feeling and thought,-these are the materials, the means, which its union with being brings before it for the exercise of its faculties, according to the tendencies, the impulses, the desires of its own peculiar nature, If that

mind, then, has but lived in freedom of its powers-if the act of its facul ties, in the continual progress of life, has been impelled from within-if it has trusted itself to feel, and rejoiced to know, as its nature led-if it has been true to itself, and cherishing its own inward discernment, and guarding the fountain of light within itself-has been able to shed from that source a pure unfailing light upon its own thought and its own motion,-if it has used intelligence and feeling as gifts made immediately to itself, for its own strength and guidance-it will, in its maturity of thought and power, and in the season of productive genius, perform the works of its great conception in the spirit in which it has lived-it will bring into being, by its operative art, substantial expression and likeness of those peculiar and individual forms of feeling and thought which it has entertained and cherished within itself in its long communion with being; and that peculiar impress on its works, may be regarded as the symbol of an individual nature unfolded in the mind -as evidence of an unoppressed spirit of life in the soul-of a mind maintaining its endowed powers entire in their native liberty.

creations. It is the expression of his own individual being, the colouring of life derived through his own senses to his work, that makes the impress of genius on the productions of his art.

On the productions of a nation's genius, it may be presumed there will be read the same character that this collective genius will express itself, will mark its own act, its own work, with the seal of its own individual character; and it may be apprehended, that this expression of an individual character in a people, will imply, as in the individual, some extraordinary self-communion in the spirit of the people.

For the spirit of a people, as that of a single being, entering upon the world of life it is to possess, finds allotted to itself its own peculiar and individual condition of existence, distinguishing it from all others. A race of men entering upon a land to dwell there, bring with them the spirit of power which is to animate and rule over their existence during the long course of its coming ages; but the life they are to lead dawns on them as they set foot on its soil. The earth itself, and the sky, to which their existence from that hour is committed, The character, therefore, of original are the groundwork of that arising genius, pure and entire, on the life. productions of art, is by no means of an importance limited within the plea sures of taste. It has a far higher significance, referring directly to the entire courses of life in the mind, and to the entire condition of the mind in all action, of whatever importance, that springs from itself. It is not to be imagined, therefore, that the sympathy of ordinary men, with that condition, however it may be to a certain degree unconscious and unintelligent, can be unimportant to themselves.

It is an essential quality of genius in the individual mind, perhaps its distinctive and most constituent quality, that it draws its powers from sources within itself—that its faculties are but the organs, as it were, of a deeper spirit, residing in, and blended with, its own deepest nature. The man himself, the living being, with all his sensibilities, recollections, loves, powers with all his experience and all his capacities of life is the deep and ex haustless source from which his genius draws the materials of its conception-the elements of its ceaseless

Mountains, and waters, and woods, and soil, and the climate, which overhangs them all, give the first determination to their existence, allotting many of their avocations, and holding in themselves the numberless influences which are to be showered continually from the countenance and the hand of nature on their progressive existence. The same change of their place of abode, has drawn around them, still farther, new circumstances of life, allotting to their society its relations with other societies of men. Still more, it has begun, to that society of their own, a new internal social life as among themselves their own relations begin necessarily to change, and new forms to grow up out of their new condition. Their manners alter to their avocations-their laws relax, or strengthen, or multiply their bonds with the changing neces sities of their life; and the powers of men over men, and the affections that mingle with those relations, change the whole aspect and being of society. The memory of their anterior being soon dies away into faint,

broken, and doubtful reminiscences; but passion cleaves to the memory of the new life they have begun, and the vigour of enjoyment, and the ardour of growing power, shew, in the strong youth of the people, the preparation of their powerful manhood. The ages roll on; and whatever their appointed life may be, it unfolds itself before them under the power of their spirit, while the power itself of their spirit is unfolding in the midst of their chang ing life. The men to whom they give birth, who rise up in their endowed strength among them, to perform conspicuously the offices of ordinary exist ence who in war, in the government of men, in the wisdom or sanctity of their lives, in the walks of peaceful genius who by their achievements, their endurance, or their great affections, signalize the power of human nature, or the peculiar character of their people, all these, whensoever they appear, springing forth, as they do, out of the heart of the nation, are no other than energies of its ownunfoldings, as it were, of their own spirit in their own life-shewings forth of their mind in realized act; and from them, therefore, redounds upon the people, from whom they have arisen, deep-reaching and lasting ener gy, of the same quality which has been so highly manifested in those particular men. So, too, and in yet higher degree, what the collective people themselves have achieved, or suffered, or greatly felt, in enterprise, in calamity, in peril, in change or revolution-is to themselves at once both a part of that national life of which they are fulfilling the course, and an act of the national spirit, strengthening and exalting itself by its own great acts, and gathering future sentiment and thought from all that it passes through. That the spirit which a people bring with them to the land of their dwelling-that the life to which they are given up, and its manifold events, should form for them a peculiar character, as well as a peculiar history, seems easily to be understood. It is for the sake of examples of these courses of nature, that we read the history of the world. We can often trace, in remarkable ways, this formation of character-this growth of the genius of a people. But what we are better able to do is to observe the results-to know the charac

ter to recognise the workings of the genius that has unfolded its strength. Men's observation of men is made intelligent, often not by their power of searching investigation, but by their quick true sympathy; and in virtue of that sympathy, and the light of intelligence which it brings, they read with strong and just interest, the characters of men, singly or in nations, and behold in their works and in their lives the discovery of their inward peculiar spirit. The strong, deep, general interest with which all the memorials of men are considered, that bear strongly impressed a peculiar and specific character, could not be explained, if we were to ascribe the intelligence of character to faculties purely intellectual; but it may be understood, if we can ascribe it to the faculties of sentiment-if we may say, for explanation, that what we call character subsists essentially in relations of the spirit to that life in which all participate, and in so much, is matter of that universal sympathy in which alone men's condition of existence is discoverable to one another-if we are at liberty to comprehend, by character, no more than peculiar modification of our common nature; and by genius itself, not simply the high endowment of intellectual powers, but the blending of intellectual powers, whatever their degree, with the tendencies and workings of each individual nature.

The individual mind, as was observed, will produce its own character in its works, only if that character has been duly unfolded; only if those properties which were strongly implanted by nature, have received due nourishment and free developement from the courses of life. But such nourishment must be self-nourishment; such developement must be self-developement. Life can do no more than lay open its fields before the mind, which must find its own nourishment, and make its own growth. But the essential principle of selfnourishment and self-developement is strong self-consciousness, maintained uniform to itself. It is, that the mind having once felt, retains that feeling; that the pleasure it has felt, from that time belongs to itself, and will recur; that the pain it has felt, from that time belongs to itself, and will recur. There is a personal identity begun and carried on in these uniform recurrences

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of sensation or emotion. The objects which present themselves to the mind are continually varying their aspect, and so far tending to perplex their own impressions. The weaker mind is overcome by this variableness of impression, and loses self-consistency; but the spirit of stronger quality is able to maintain its own uniformity of feeling and belief in the midst of much variation, and by that means forms its own strength, making its inherent qualities more and more predominant Over the impressions, by which they are continually called into play. But that continual recollection and recovery upon itself of former emotion, affection, and sensation, by which alone this superiority to present impression can be maintained, is of the nature of a self-communion; it is a reflection of the mind upon itself; it is a self-consciousness prolonged or reproduced; it is an internal repetition, with consciousness of its own emotion, to which it attaches itself more and more.

Like this, perhaps, is the formation of character in a people. There may be assigned to their spirit such a life as will quench and destroy it; but if it find a happier lot, if the ways of life that are opened before it are such as strengthen its great qualities and solicit its gentler ones to gentle action, then the growth of character will take place by uniformity of emotion. If there be a lofty magnanimity in the spirit, war will strengthen and unfold it. If that property were less deeply fixed, the exceeding hazards and the disasters of war would oppress it; but if it be indeed in the nature, it rises from them more glorious. The spirit has derived from the accidents of life its occasion of strength, but it has been by subjugating those accidents to itself. That proud and stately satisfaction in its own greatness, by which its fortitude is sustained, is not a feeling known only and produced at the time of need; it must be a habitual temper of the spirit, continually nourished in the ordinary process of life. There is implied a conscious and thoughtful grandeur-a mind turned back in reflection on former deeds, deliberately knowing its own greatnessand, with deliberate purpose, choosing the virtue of which it has already made experience.

Whatever quality of the spirit of a people might be brought under con

sideration, the same argument might be held, that it must be self-nourished by a reflective consciousness. Can we conceive otherwise of that beautiful character of the patriotism of the Swiss, which we suppose to blend the love of their native land with the imagery of its scenes. The love that is felt in its mountain-vales is a feeling that has filled all the years of life. It has returned upon every bosom ten thousand and ten thousand times—the peaceful benediction of each successive day that has risen and set upon the mighty land,-love swelling the heart, and drawing from torrent and rock, from green pasture, and shaggy wood, and naked sky-piercing peak, the sights and sounds of its continual nourishment.

The heart filled with its affections, and the intellectual spirit, have both but one law from nature, by which they may form their strength;-it must be self-cherished.

The character, the genius of a people, if it be great and beautiful, is the result of a life of ages, in which the great and beautiful qualities of their spirit have been exercised and nourished with continual ministries from natural life, and continual indulgence of selfdelight. In that character subsists the record of the virtue and happiness of successive generations of innumerable men. That vast immeasurable flood of life has rolled into night, unbeheld, for the greater part, even while the sun shone upon it, and now engulphed in forgetfulness; but a power remains from it-its spirit inhabits the earth, quickening the countless progeny of life in continual renovation.

If we are able to bear sympathy to the departed multitudes of a people, if the imagination or belief of their virtues, their powers, their loves, be any thing to us who now walk on their soil, then the aspect of the genius, and the character which from them yet subsists amongst us, will be great and dear to us, for the sake of that which has disappeared and left no other me morial. Even the works of skilful art, small as their importance may seem to be, when compared with the living happiness of the millions of a people, will, for their sake, be no longer unimportant, when they bear impressed on them that character, which the life of those millions has brought into being. The works of art of a

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