opinion has been regarded more orthodoxical than this, that the arts and sciences flourish in the greatest perfection in the land where liberty resides. Whatever is prone to flatter our vanity is always sure of a hospitable reception. Probably it may be a justifiable artifice to deck, what we may venture to call the tutelary goddess of our country, in whatever alluring traits it is in the power not of fact only, but of fancy to bestow. This arrays on the side of liberty the powerful auxiliaries; but we question whether they were ever exclusively enlisted in her service. The arts, like Swiss, are mere mercenaries, and fight wherever they receive pay under whatever masters. Tyrants who wish to emblazon their memories beyond their crimes-to soften the fierce and sanguinary beams of their ambition, interpose the delicate medium of the arts. The rays are then softened to our liking, and we view the object of our former dread as a mild and cheerful luminary, dispensing a salubrious and invigorating light. Virgil while fed at the table of Augustus, beheld no longer the countenance of the cold blooded and cowardly assassin-the man whose smiles were murder and whose hospitality was death; but the benificent and protecting deity of Rome, Liberty, was bleeding in all her arteries; but the Muse of Virgil denominated the victim Faction, and insulted her dying agonies. Horace while he participated in the smiles of the tyrant, and was allowed to enjoy his Bacchanalian revels, turned a deaf ear to the voice of his country, and could say without a blush on his cheek, "non benè relicta parmula," at the battle of Pharsalia. And yet, if Virgil was not a resolute panegyrist, we might inquire, with what propriety, in his visions of Elysium, Cæsar and Fabius, Augustus and Cincinnatus were joined together, with encomiums on the characters of each? What Scipio, what Fabius, what Cincinnatus, laboured to establish, both Cæsar and Augustus laboured to overthrow, and yet all of them received the homage of Virgil's muse. In truth, the bard found himself in an aukward predicament; he dared not pass over the names of Scipio and Fabius and Cincinnatus without respectful notice, because their characters had been consecrated already, and could receive from his muse no additional lustre. So on the other hand, Cæsar and Augustus must have received the adora

tion of his fancy, because his subsistence depended on the deed. He therefore divided his conscience, and gave one half to servile flattery, and reserved the other half for justice.

Without further preface, we will now proceed to submit to the reader's attention some remarks on a volume entitled Rhymes on Art, or the Remonstrance of a Painter, in two parts, with notes, and a preface, including strictures on the state of the arts, criticism, patronage and public taste, by Martin Archer Shee, Esq.

We have attempted to form some conception of the reader's surprize from the humble and unoştentatious nature of the title. Imagining that there was no enjoyment in reserve, he would cast an eye of indolent curiosity over the page until he was lost in a labyrinth of poetic beauty. The author is not only a poet but a painter, and we think we can discover in this artifice, a specimen of his ability in the graphic art. It is certainly the law of contrast. The author, conscious of his own powers, apparently labours to shrink them up into a dimunitive compass, until he suddenly extends them over the whole region of Parnassus. We will not venture to say that he has committed practical plagiarism on Milton's devils; but his artifices remind. ed us of a similar one, which if the blind bard may be credited, his infernal spirits adopted.

"Behold a wonder! they but now who seem'd

In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons

Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng'd numberless."

The first commences

This poem is divided into two parts. with a most beautiful and animated invective on the opinion sometimes entertained, that the soil and climate of England are unpropitious to the growth of literature and the arts. We question whether it is in the power of genius to produce any thing superior to this-the author does not say that England has given birth to Milton-to Shakspeare-to Dryden-to Pope-to Newton and to Locke, and, of course is not averse to the sciences and the arts; but in an exquisitely beautiful apostrophe to those immortal men, he denominates such a declaration an insult. This, while it seems to be merely an explosion of honest and

patriotic indignation, refutes the charge, and we have all the compactness of argument and energy of the muse combined together. Exquisite as this is, we doubt whether the poet was sensible of it; he gazed with fervency on those illustrious models-kindled with indignation at the calumny, and brought those models and that calumny together:-so true is the observation of that profound anatomist of moral nature, Edmund Burke, that "our passions sometimes instruct our reason." The author then proceeds to tell, in the same vein of impassioned poetry, how painting flourishes when cultivated by patronage that patronage overcomes every obstacle that nature herself erects to the improvement of the arts. He then turns with indignation and disdain on those English critics who deem it the perfection of taste to slander English genius. True to his trade, he pauses in his glowing career, to pay the tribute of a tear to those eminent artists of his country, whose genius and whose glory his native land inherits. In a voice of awful admonition, he remonstrates to the tyros of the graphic art, not to be led astray by the casual liking they may feel, and to conclude from them that they are capable of arriving at eminence. He feelingly portrays the obstacles they will have to encounterhe warns them that neither the rewards of fortune, the sole recompense of avaricious minds, nor glory, the only reward of an ambition more noble, dignified and commanding, infallibly await them, although genius may bestow on them her richest gifts. He tells them, that unless they feel that enthusiasm in the study that is always the incentive, and too often the only reward of genius, and which is alone sufficient to encounter the rugged obstacles that intervene, to throw aside their pencils and not become candidates for public shame. He then apostrophises the era rendered so illustrious by the administration of Lorenzo De Medici, and gives a character of that man equally compendious, forcible and just. He laments that the death of public liberty should be the era of the resurrection of the arts. This leads him by a gentle and beautiful gradation to consider the state of his native country, and with a patriotic, disinterested spirit, he reprobates the thought that such an example should prove a precedent for her. Sooner would he renounce the art to which his soul is so

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passionately devoted, than to behold the arts combining to decorate, by their various tributes, the tomb of his country's freedom. He looks for better things; and concludes with an ardent aspiration, that the favoured repository of liberty may remain to future ages the favoured repository of the arts. How tame and insipid does this narrative appear! How inadequate is the justice done to a poet, by attempting to comprehend his glowing and brilliant thoughts in prosaic language.

Notes are added by the author, in which he displays a knowledge, deep, extensive and accurate. We carefully avoid that general and indiscriminate remark, which is often an artifice adopted by ignorance to veil its own imbecility. He considers the arts in all their details, and marks with a scrutinizing eye their delicate and sometimes almost imperceptible diversities. We do not see that suffocating egotism, disgusting self confidence, and pomp of quotation manifested by the author of the Pursuits of Literature, whose notes seem to smother his poemon the contrary, whatever " he touches-he adorns." Knowing himself to be an accomplished and elegant writer, he is content that his works should speak for him, and does not deem it necessary to tell his reader the fact in so many words. His notes are in the strictest sense illustrative and explanatory, and it has often excited a smile on our lips, to observe the precise delicacy with which he throws out his metaphors. The style of his prose is said to resemble Burke's. We are compelled to differ from this opinion-Burke's drapery is always gorgeous and dazzling, always rich and variegated, but it is thrown negligently on the limbs, with that impatience that designates a mind aspiring after something of more importance. The moments Burke devotes to illustration are taken from his main design, and while we pause to admire the brilliancy of a particular paragraph, he has already the start of us-has arrived on several stages before us, and, with a scowl of anxiety, pauses and awaits our coming up. There is in all the productions of Burke an impatience of any thing like restraint or delay. He takes the reader or the auditor by main force, and makes him partake of his celerity of movement, however sluggish and inert he is by nature. The reader is even sensible of pain in his intellectual

journey from the bustle, tumult and crowd of ideas by which he is surrounded. His mind is distracted in the same way that he would be in being ushered suddenly into a painting gallery, where every performance was executed by a consummate artist. Every object breaks upon him at once-his eye roams over each in a hurried and agitated manner, without leisure to examine one, and he returns filled with incongruous images, glittering cascades, dungeons, towers, rainbows, angels, men and devils, crowd and intersect, rise and fall in splendid and elaborate confusion. Shee, on the other hand, composes himself for the task; with all the painter's leisure, he touches and retouches his mctaphor until it has acquired all the grace and delicacy he is capable of bestowing on it, and then with a smiling assurance presents it as not unworthy of regard. Surely, the man must be blind indeed to the grand characteristics of Burke that can dis cover his traces in the following passage. "Society is a grand machine, all the parts of which depend on each other in such delicate and intimate connection, and are so nicely adjusted by the cautious hands of time and experience, that it seems no easy matter for the most expert political mechanic to ascertain exactly what pin or wheel can be pulled out or removed, without danger to its most ingenious and essential movements. Interest, selfinterest is the firm supporting pivot on which the whole enginery rests and turns; want, passion, ambition are the main springs of its operation; wealth, honour, pleasure, glory, luxury, the principal wheels which communicating motion to all the dependant arrangements of minuter mechanism, at length set forward the golden hands of genius and taste, to move on the lial of existence and point to the brightest periods of time, and he most memorable epochas of man." Now the sense of this passage is admirable, and the metaphor highly finished; but the illustration has almost entirely dissipated the meaning. We look for society, and see nothing but a watch, and if we do not hear its tick also, it is not the fault of Mr. Shee,

Burke, if such a metaphor had escaped him, would have dashed his pen over it in a pet, and would have censured himself for writing, and the reader still more for being detained by such a passage.