NOTES ON ART.

"The use of this feigned history" (the Ideal Arts of Poesy, Painting, Music, &c.) "hath been to give SOME SHADOW OF SATISFACTION TO

THE MIND OF MAN IN THESE POINTS WHEREIN THE NATURE OF

THINGS DOTH DENY IT, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof, there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, A MORE

AMPLE GREATNESS, A MORE EXACT GOODNESS AND A MORE AB

SOLUTE VARIETY, than can be found in the nature of things. So it. appeareth that Poesy" (and the others) “serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was even thought to have some participation of divineness because IT DOTH RAISE AND DI

RECT THE MIND, BY SUBMITTING THE SHEWS OF THINGS TO THE DE

SIRES OF THE MIND; whereas reason (science, philosophy) doth "buckle and bow the mind to the nature of things."—Of the ProfiCIENCE AND ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING.

NOTES ON ART.1

wife

NE evening in the spring of 1846, as my and I were sitting at tea, Parvula in bed, and the Sputchard reposing, as was her wont, with her rugged little brown forepaws over the edge of the fender, her eyes shut, toasting, and all but roasting herself at the fire, a note was brought in, which from its fat, soft look, by a hopeful and not unskilled palpation I diagnosed as that form of lucre which in Scotland may well be called filthy. I gave it across to Madam, who, opening it, discovered four five-pound notes, and a letter addressed to me. She gave it me. It was from Hugh Miller, editor of the Witness newspaper, asking me to give him a notice of the Exhibition of the Scottish Academy then open, in words I now forget, but which were those of a thorough gentleman, and enclosing the aforesaid fee. I can still remember or indeed feel the kind of shiver, half of fear and pleasure, on encountering this temptation; but I soon said, "You know I can't take this; I can't write; I never wrote a word for the press." She, with "wifelike government," kept the money, and heartened me to write, and write I did but with awful sufferings and difficulty, I think the only person

and much destruction of sleep.

1 Originally prefixed to a Criticism on some paintings in the Sco⭑ tish Academy.

who suffered still more must have been the compositor Had this packet not come in, and come in when it did, and had the Sine Qua Non not been peremptory and retentive, there are many chances to one I might never have plagued any printer with my bad hand and my endless corrections, and general incoherency in all transactions as to proofs.

I tell this small story, partly for my own pleasure, and as a tribute to that remarkable man, who stands alongside of Burns, and Scott, Chalmers, and Carlyle, the foremost Scotsmen of their time, a rough, almost rugged nature, shaggy with strength, clad with zeal as with a cloak, in some things sensitive and shamefaced as a girl; moody and self-involved, but never selfish, full of courage, and of keen insight into nature and men, and the principles of both, but simple as a child in the ways of the world; self-taught and self-directed, argumentative and scientific, as few men of culture have ever been, and yet with more imagination than either logic or knowledge; to the last as shy and blate as when working in the quarries at Cromarty. In his life a noble example of what our breed can produce, of what energy, honesty, intensity, and genius can achieve; and in his death a terrible example of that revenge which the body takes upon the soul when brought to bay by its inex orable taskmaster. I need say no more. His story is more tragic than any tragedy. Would to God it may warn those who come after to be wise in time, to take the same -I ask no more care of their body, which is their servant, their beast of burden, as they would of their horse.

Few men are endowed with such a brain as Hugh Miller huge, active, concentrated, keen to fierceness

and therefore few men need fear, even if they misuse and overtask theirs as he did, that it will turn, as it did with him, and rend its master. But as assuredly as there is a certain weight which a bar of iron will bear and no more, so is there a certain weight of work which the organ by which we act, by which we think, and feel, and willcannot sustain, blazing up into brief and ruinous madness, or sinking into idiocy. At the time he wrote to me, Mr. Miller and I were strangers, and I don't think I ever spoke to him: but his manner of doing the above act made me feel, that in that formidable and unkempt nature there lay the delicacy, the generosity, the noble trustfulness of a gentleman born not made. Most men have, and almost every man should have a hobby it is exercise in a mild way, and does not take him away from home; it diverts him; and by having a double line of rails, he can manage to keep the permanent way in good condition. A man who has only one object in life, only one line of rails, who exercises only one set of faculties, and these only in one way, will wear himself out much sooner than a man who shunts himself every now and then, and who has trains coming as well as going; who takes in as well as gives out.

My hobby has always been pictures, and all we call Art. I have fortunately never been a practitioner, though I think I could have made a tolerable hand; but unless a man is a thoroughly good artist, he injures his enjoyment, generally speaking, of the art of others. am convinced, however, that to enjoy art thoroughly, every man must have in him the possibility of doing it as well as liking it. He must feel it in his fingers, as well as in his head and at his eyes; and it must find it way from all the three to his heart, and be emotive.