OF

CRITICIS M.

Q.

BY THE HONOURABLE

HENRY HOME OF KAMES,

ONE OF THE SEXATORS OF THE COLLEGE OF JUSTICE, AND ONE OF THE LORDS

COMMISSIONERS OF JUSTICIARY IN SCOTLAND.

SECOND AMERICAN FROM THE EIGHTH LONDON EDITION

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL; EI;: ;

PHILADELPHIA-PUBLISHED BY M. CAREY,

No. 121, Chesnut Street.

1816.

407103

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATION

1903

OF all the fine arts, painting only and sculpture are in their nature imitative. An ornamented field is not a copy or imitation of nature, but nature itself embellished. Architecture is productive of originals, and copies not from nature. Sound and motion may in some measure be imitated by music; but for the most part music, like architecture, isproductive of originals. Language copies not from nature, more than music, or architecture; unles, where, like music, it is imitativa of sound or motion. Thus, in the description of particular sounds, language sometimes furnisljeth words, which, beside their custoraary power of. exciting ideas, resemble by their softoese 'or harshness the sounds described ; and there are words which, by the celerity or slowness of pronunciation, have some red semblance to the motion they signify. The imitative power of words goes one step farther : the loftiness of some words makes them proper symbols of Jofty ideas; a rough subject is imitated by harsh-sounding words; and words of many syllables pronounced slow and smooth, are expressive of grief and melancholy. Words have a seat parate effect on the mind, abstracting from their Vol. II.

B