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There is a great want, in the Disowned, of that ease and smoothness of style, which is so remarkable in Scott, and which is very necessary to a novelist, because the want of it has the same effect in the hurry of excited interest, as a rough road to a hasty traveller. Our author, too, has a great many of the peculiarities which are fashionable at present both among the prose writers and the poets in England at the present day. Such for instance as those comparisons with one dimension of resemblance, so common in the Wordsworth school of poets, and which to us seem to have neither the merit of beauty or illustration. Take for example, in the Disowned;- Self-love sat upon his forehead as upon a throne.' And again, His lip seemed to wear scorn as a garment.'

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Among other cants, the author has a good deal of cant in describing persons. He seems to be haunted with a certain beau ideal of character, which obtrudes itself into all his portraits, and reminds one of the picture of Mathews' French Diligence, in which all the figures, from the coachman to the old lady, have the omnipresent visage of Mr. Mathews. So the "chiselled and classic features," and the "quiet aristocratic mien and simplicity of dress" are indispensable attributes of all his respectable personages, from Pelham and Mordaunt to Crawford. His manner of describing characters is very foppish, and among certain persons very much calculated to produce an affectation, of which they have not the discrimination and taste to perceive its folly. He enters too, rather too much into the details and minutiae of dress, address, and behavior, which, though very well, thought of and attended to as they should be by all, are the private decencies of a man's own thoughts, and no more to be spoken of in relation to ourselves or others, than any other of a man's personal mysteries.

There are a great many other minor offences against good taste and a just sense of dignity, which it might, perhaps, appear to be hypercriticism in us to censure. Such for instance, as the author's rhapsodies upon his own love affairs, and several things of the same sort. But we have been thus hard upon faults of this kind, as well as upon the author's morality, because both Pelham and the Disowned have been very much admired, and indeed may be said to have produced considerable effect in this country; and because it is these deficiencies in his style of writing, dignity, and morality, which have produced in our minds something, which, considering that he has been compared to the greatest masters in his art, approaches very near to contempt. The office of a novelist, we consider to be a very responsible and a very elevated one. It requires not only a great justness of moral principle and an exact degree of feeling and enthusiasm, but moreover a nice sense of delicacy and dignity; and we must confess that we have no patience that a book which is deficient in all these qualities, and, in spite of all the literary littlenesses with which it is filled, should be advanced, with a sort of profanity of public taste, to an equality with Scott and Edgeworth, and passing uncensured, even by the fair and the reverend.

L.

MOSES ON THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT PISGAH.

I SEE the land before me lie,

Nor sacrifice, at morn or even,

To which my wandering feet have turned; Nor with assembled Israel raise

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THE Fine Arts are said by one whom artists have justly deemed a high priest of the fraternity, to "belong to an age of luxury." To us, hard-delving, hand-to-mouth generation of Yankees the word luxury,' is anti-republican, and not so reputable an epithet as it is in some other ears. Instead of imparting to a common man a downy idea of comfort, and causing him to wish the arrival of that day, ten chances to one that he wiped his brow in pious solemnity, and looked awfully republican at the sound. His thoughts might, perhaps, settle on some soft handed Moslem, sitting cross-legged in his big turban and trowsers, with pipe and opium, hot coffee, hot baths and harem, but on nothing better. A state of licentiousness and enervating excess however, is not meant as the fit soil of the Fine Arts. Hard-delving and hard favored as we are, it behoves us to look to their cultivation; and to foster those who have embarked their genius and ambition in rendering them worthy of our regard and us worthy of regarding them. The useful and the beautiful are never apart,' said Periander :—and it is a blind man's question to ask, why those things should be loved, which are beautiful.'

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An age of luxury,' in this connexion, is that stage of society, when a nation, snugly ensconced behind its walls of political security, has become so thrifty in the pursuits of peace that it can spare a portion of its wealth, leisure, and talents, to something more than the daily bread,' and homely necessities of life-that stage when it is fain to consult ease as well as convenience, and study how to unite beauty with utility-when society has toiled up from homely want to refined plenty-and 'the three-legged stool,' as Cowper

has playfully portrayed it, by slow transitions has reached "the accomplish'd sofa,”

an

"Necessity invented stools,

Convenience next suggested elbow chairs,

And luxury th' accomplish'd Sofa last."

Have we reached such a stage? If, after the fashion of some, answer were to be gathered from the disposition practically manifested in starving the Arts and their disciples out of the land, verily, their day and generation has not yet arrived. But there is in this answer a slur upon the taste of our countrymen, though artists will insist upon having it thus, which has in it a spice of spleen and petulance. It is a fact-accounted for in the history of our political extract and growth-that we possess the ingredients of such an age, in an unequal proportion: in taste, genius and refinement we are in the advance of wealth and leisure. The fellows of every profession, craft and mystery, here, which is not reared directly on the wants of life, are constrained to keep each other in countenance by relieving their spleen in similar complaints, with the more bitterness in artists, doubtless, from their discovering in the intellectual culture of society a refinement above its means, an ability to appreciate what we cannot buy; a yankee struggle, in short, to live above our cloth.' The inconsistency, instead of being the object of invidious stigma, is, as was remarked, naturally and historically accounted for in the story of our political birth. We did not, either in laws, religion, or taste, come up as nations are wont to be matured; but present the novel spectacle of a nation brought up,' or rather, struck out, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter.

The consequence is, we have taken leave of our political parent, as is the case of most wilful children, better educated than endowed. Our British inheritance is that of an English younger brotherproud, but poor-well taught, but ill treated-blood enough, with none of the heraldry-pretensions in abundance, but little of the patririmony. In behalf of our inheritance, too, we are reputed to have improved unequally upon the old ancestral stock. In pride, which ran high enough in the veins of our Father Bull, and has been mounting fast enough for all practical purposes ever since, we are said to have won the race; have the credit of arrogating more, even, than is esteemed good manners in the old world. This foible, seconded by no better an endorser than poverty, could not fail of exposing us to merited stigma and the spleen of disappointment. Those however who have cast off their bile, should not persist in reproaching the taste and genius of the land with its poverty and pride. Nor should they miscal the latter. It is poverty, and not parsimony; nor is much of its pride vanity. Pride can scarcely vaunt itself into vanity while scanning the immunities, great and good,

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which have rendered our clime the bulwark of freedom, be it ever so windy and grandiloquent-though there are features in the caprices and elegant indulgencies of life which betray a national homage to the meaner branch of the sentiment, revealing an ambitious ostentation of those points which make out the reputation of being large and liberal. As to parsimony, the prodigality of our countrymen of their little wealth is the standing paradox of travellers. are written down and printed, by each and every one of them, as spending money faster, wearing finer cloth, wasting more at dinner and the like, than they do even at the old homestead.

The inquiries, why the Elegant Arts have not found here a fostering hand, nor the talent and ambition of our countrymen been embarked with more confidence and success in them, are plainly correlative; and the last is answered by having answered the first. If so, the bitterness of speech and professional pique with which they have sometimes been put, is worse than idle; not to speak of the hazard of running under the retort courteous, of a writer in the North American Review, who, by changing ends with the alternative, makes the latter account for the first. Prithee, friend,' quoth he, with an argumentum ad hominem henceforth hermetically sealing the lips of every pining artist, show us that thing of thine worthy of our money which we have not bought !' It is some relief, even, to find oneself speaking with unprofessional lips :-albeit, the above felonious sealing was rendered somewhat abortive and untenable by the prompt humanity of Mr. S. F. B. M., "P. N. A.” [?*] in the day and time of it. The issue there joined was upon painting principally, and held, too, in so close equipoise between them as to be in no danger of being jostled by our steps, if we proceed to account for the national supineness in another way. Poverty, beyond dispute, is the ultimate cause. Depending on the absence of amassed wealth, or the certainty, rather, of its being soon scattered by our Lycurgan rule of distribution, we have not been often enough, nor long enough, presented with specimens in the arts on which to educate a taste, and from which to catch enthusiasm. From want of familiarity, our countrymen have not been convinced of their intimate bearing on the success of the useful arts; nor been able sufficiently to taste of the pleasure, enduring, exalted and rational which they are capable of imparting.

Particularly is this true of Sculpture. Situated as we are, far from the land in which the Art had its ancient abode and burial,' as well as from the modern schools in which it has been revived— the treasures of each, therefore, too remote for success, by the breadth of an ocean; and we too poor to raise the wind' that should waft them nearer-it is a matter of course that they should

*P. N. A. President of the National Academy. [ED.

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