and commentator, as well as a zealous literary antiquary. He edited Shakspeare (1790), wrote Memoirs of Dryden, Sir Joshua Reynolds, W. Gerard Hamilton, &c.; was the friend of Goldsmith, Burke, and Johnson, and still more emphatically the friend of Johnson's biographer, Boswell; and in nearly all literary questions for half a century he took a lively interest, and was always ready with notes or illustrations. Mr Malone was the son of an Irish judge, and born in Dublin. After studying at Trinity College, he repaired to London, was entered of the Inner Temple, and called to the bar in 1767. His life, however, was devoted to literature, in which he was a useful and delighted pioneer. The fame of English scholarship and classical criticism descended from Bentley to Porson. RICHARD PORSON (1759-1808) was in 1793 unanimously elected Professor of Greek in the university of Cambridge. Besides many fugitive and miscellaneous contributions to classical journals, Porson edited and annotated the first four plays of Euripides, which appeared separately between 1797 and 1801. He collected the Harleian manuscript of the Odyssey for the Grenville edition of Homer (1800), and corrected the text of Eschylus and part of Herodotus. After his death, his Adversaria, or Notes and Emendations of the Greek Poets, were published by Professor Monk and Mr J. C. Blomfield-afterwards Bishop of London—and his Tracts and Miscellaneous Criticisms were collected and published by the Rev. T. Kidd. The most important of these were the Letters to Archdeacon Travis (1790), written to disprove the authenticity of 1 John, v. 7, and which are admirable specimens of learning, wit, and acute argumentation. Porson as a Greek critic has never perhaps been excelled. He rose from a humble station-his father was a parish-clerk in Norfolk -solely by his talents and early proficiency; his memory was prodigious, almost unexampled, and his acuteness and taste in Greek literature were unerring. The habits of this great scholar were, however, fatal to his success in life. He was even more intemperate than Sheridan, careless of the usual forms and courtesies of society, and impracticable in ordinary affairs. His love of drink amounted to a passion, or rather disease. His redeeming qualities, besides his scholastic acquirements and natural talents, were his strict integrity and love of truth. Many of his pointed sayings were remembered by his friends. Being on one occasion informed that Southey considered his poem Madoc as likely to be a valuable possession to his family, Porson answered: Madoc will be read-when Homer and Virgil are forgotten.' The ornate style of Gibbon was his aversion. "There could not,' he said, 'be a better exercise for a school-boy than to turn a page of The Decline and Fall into English.' He disliked reading folios, 'because,' said he, 'we meet with so few milestones' that is, we have such long intervals between the turning over of the leaves. On the whole, though Porson was a critic of the highest order, and though conceding to classical literature all the respect that can be claimed for it, we must lament, with one of his friends, that such a man should have lived and laboured for nearly half a century, and yet have left little or nothing to the world that was truly and originally his own.' WILLIAM COBBETT. WILLIAM COBBETT (1762-1835), by his Rural Rides, his Cottage Economy, his works on America, and various parts of his Political Register, is justly entitled to be remembered among the miscellaneous writers of England. He was a native of Farnham, in Surrey, and brought up as an agricultural labourer. He afterwards served as a soldier in British America, and rose to be sergeant-major. He first attracted notice as a political writer by publishing a series of pamphlets under the name of Peter Porcupine. He was then a decided loyalist and high-churchman; but having, as is supposed, received some slight from Mr Pitt, he attacked his ministry with great bitterness in his Register. After the passing of the Reform Bill, he was returned to parliament for the borough of Oldham; but he was not successful as a public speaker. He was apparently destitute of the faculty of generalising his information and details, and evolving from them a lucid whole. His unfixedness of principle also operated strongly against him; for no man who is not considered honest and sincere, or who cannot be relied upon, will ever make a lasting impression on a popular assembly. Cobbett's inconsistency as a political writer was so broad and undisguised, as to have become proverbial. He had made the whole round of politics, from ultraToryism to ultra-Radicalism, and had praised and abused nearly every public man and measure for thirty years. Jeremy Bentham said of him: He is a man filled with odium humani generis. His malevolence and lying are beyond anything.' The retired philosopher did not make sufficient allowance for Cobbett: the latter acted on the momentary feeling or impulse, and never calculated the consequence to himself or others. No individual in Britain was better known than Cobbett, down to the minutest circumstance in his character, habits, and opinions. He wrote freely of himself as he did of other men; and in all his writings there was much natural freshness, liveliness, and vigour. He had the power of making every one who read him feel and understand completely what he himself felt and described. The idiomatic strength, copiousness, and purity of his style have been universally acknowledged; and when engaged in describing rural subjects, or depicting local manners, he is very happy. On questions of politics or criticism he fails, because he seems resolved to attack all great names and established opinions. He remarks on one occasion that anybody could, at the time he wrote, be made a baronet, since Walter Scott and Dudley Coutts Trotter (what a classification!) had been so elevated. It has become,' he says, 'of late years the fashion to extol the virtues of potatoes, as it has been to admire the writings of Milton and Shakspeare;' and he concludes a ludicrous criticism on Paradise Lost by wondering how it could have been tolerated by a people amongst whom astronomy, navigation, and chemistry are understood! Yet Cobbett had a taste for what may be termed the poetry of nature. He is loud in his praises of the singing-birds of England-which he missed so much in America-and he loved to write on green lanes and meadows. The following description is like the simple and touching to produce or preserve health. I prefer them to all passages in Richardson's Pamela : Boyish Scenes and Recollections. other pastime, because they produce early rising; WILLIAM COMBE-JOSEPH RITSON. This After living within a few hundred yards of Westminster Hall, and the Abbey Church, and the Bridge, and looking from my own windows into St James's Park, all other buildings and spots appear mean and insignificant. I went to-day to see the house I formerly occupied. How small! It is always thus: the words large and small are carried about with us in our minds, and we forget real dimensions. The idea, such as it was received, remains during our absence from the object. When I returned to England in 1800, after an absence, from the country parts of it, of sixteen years, the trees, the hedges, even the parks and woods, seemed so small! It made me laugh to hear little gutters that I could jump over called rivers! The Thames was but a 'creek!' But when, in about a month after my WILLIAM COMBE (1741-1823) was an extensive arrival in London, I went to Farnham, the place of my birth, what was my surprise! Everything was miscellaneous writer both in prose and verse. To become so pitifully small! I had to cross, in my postnone of his works did he affix his name, but he chaise, the long and dreary heath of Bagshot; then, had no reluctance in assuming the names of at the end of it, to mount a hill called Hungry Hill; others. Among his literary frauds was a collecand from that hill I knew that I should look down into tion of Letters of the late Lord Lyttelton, 1780-82. the beautiful and fertile vale of Farnham. My heart Thomas, the second or 'wicked Lord Lyttelton,' fluttered with impatience, mixed with a sort of fear, to was remarkable for his talents and profligacy, and see all the scenes of my childhood; for I had learned for the romantic circumstances attending his before the death of my father and mother. There is a hill not far from the town, called Crooksbury Hill, which death, which, he said, had been foretold by an rises up out of a flat in the form of a cone, and is apparition, but which it is now believed was an Combe personated the character planted with Scotch fir-trees. Here I used to take the act of suicide. eggs and young ones of crows and magpies. This hill of this dissolute nobleman-with whom he had was a famous object in the neighbourhood. It served as been at school at Eton-and the spurious letters the superlative degree of height. As high as Crooks- are marked by ease, elegance, and occasional bury Hill,' meant, with us, the utmost degree of height. force of style. An attempt was made in the Therefore the first object that my eyes sought was this Quarterly Review, 1852, to prove that these hill. I could not believe my eyes! Literally speaking, Letters were genuine, and that Lyttelton was the I for a moment thought the famous hill removed, and a author of Junius's Letters. The proof was wholly little heap put in its stead; for I had seen in New inconclusive, and there seems no doubt that Brunswick a single rock, or hill of solid rock, ten times Combe wrote the pseudo-Lyttelton epistles. In as big, and four or five times as high! The post-boy the same vein he manufactured a series of Letters going down-hill, and not a bad road, whisked me in a few minutes to the Bush Inn, from the garden of which supposed to have passed between Sterne and Eliza. I could see the prodigious sand-hill where I had begun He wrote a satirical work, The Diaboliad, and a my gardening works. What a nothing! But now came continuation or imitation of Le Sage, entitled rushing into my mind all at once my pretty little garden, The Devil upon Two Sticks in England, 1790; my little blue smock-frock, my little nailed shoes, my but the most popular of all Combe's works was pretty pigeons that I used to feed out of my hands, the The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturlast kind words and tears of my gentle and tender-esque, which was originally published in the hearted and affectionate mother! I hastened back into If I had looked a moment longer I should have dropped. When I came to reflect, what a change! I looked down at my dress. What a change! scenes I had gone through! How altered my state! I had dined the day before at a secretary of state's in company with Mr Pitt, and had been waited upon by men in gaudy liveries! I had had nobody to assist me in the world. No teachers of any sort. Nobody to shelter me from the consequence of bad, and no one to counsel me to good behaviour. I felt proud. The distinctions of rank, birth, and wealth all became nothing in my eyes; and from that moment-less than a month after my arrival in England-I resolved never to bend before them. the room. What Poetical Magazine, with humorous illustrations by Rowlandson, and afterwards (1812) printed separately in one volume. The Tour went through several editions; the descriptions, in lively verse, were attractive, and the coloured engravings-in which the appearance of Syntax was well preserved-formed an excellent comment on the text. Combe wrote other poems in the style of Syntax-as Johnny Qua Genus, The English Dance of Death, The Dance of Life, &c. None of these, though aided by humorous illustrations, had much success, and Syntax itself, once so popular, is now rarely seen. A voluminous History of Westminster Abbey, in two volumes quarto, was written by Combe, who, up to There are good sense and right feeling in the his eightieth year, and often in prison, continued following sentence On Field-sports. Taking it for granted, then, that sportsmen are as good as other folks on the score of humanity, the sports of the field, like everything else done in the fields, tend to pour forth anonymous productions in almost every department of literature. He was well connected, and at one time rich, but a life of folly and extravagance kept him always in embarrassment. The following is a short specimen of the Lyttelton fabrication : Genius and Talent generally appreciated by the World I sincerely lament with you the death of Dr Goldsmith, as a very considerable loss to the learned, the laughing, and the sentimental world. His versatile genius was capable of producing satisfaction to persons of all these varying denominations. But I shall, without hesitation, combat the opinion which you derive from the insolvent state in which he died, that talent and genius meet with an ungrateful return from mankind. Tell me, I beg of you, in what respect Dr Goldsmith was neglected? As soon as his talents were known, the public discovered a ready disposition to reward them; nor did he ever produce the fruits of them in vain. If your favourite author died in poverty, it was because he had not discretion enough to be rich. A rigid obedience to the Scripture demand of 'Take no thought for to-morrow,' with an ostentatious impatience of coin, and an unreflecting spirit of benevolence, occasioned the difficulties of his life and the insolvency of its end. He might have blessed himself with a happy independence, enjoyed without interruption every wish of a wise man, secured an ample provision for his old age, if he had attained it, and have made a respectable last will and testament; and all this without rising up early or sitting up late, if common-sense had been added to his other attainments. Such a man is awakened into the exertion of his faculties but by the impulse of some sense which demands enjoyment, or some passion which cries aloud for gratification, by the repeated menace of a creditor, or the frequent dun at his gate. Nay, should the necessity of to-day be relieved, the procrastinated labour will wait for the necessity of to-morrow; and if death should overtake him in the interval, it must find him a beggar, and the age is to be accused of obduracy in suffering genius to die for want! If Pope had been a debauchee he would have lived in a garret, nor enjoyed the Attic elegance of his villa on the banks of the Thames. If Sir Joshua Reynolds had been idle and drunken, he might at this hour have been acquiring a scanty maintenance by painting coach-panels and Birmingham tea-boards. Had not David Hume possessed the invariable temper of his country, he might have been the actual master of a school in the Hebrides; and the inimitable Garrick, if he had possessed Shuter's character, would have acquired little more than Shuter's fame, and suffered Shuter's end. Learning and fine talents must be respected and valued in all enlightened ages and nations; nay, they have been known to awaken a most honourable venera tion in the breasts of men accustomed to spoil, and The great Emathian conqueror bid The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Rest then assured, my friend, when a man of learning antiquary and critic, was indefatigable in his labours to illustrate English literature, particularly the neglected ballad-strains of the nation. He published in 1783 a valuable Collection of English Songs; in 1790, Ancient Songs, from the time of Henry III. to the Revolution; in 1792, Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry; in 1794, A Collection of Scottish Songs; in 1795, A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, &c. relating to Robin Hood, &c. Ritson was a faithful and acute editor, profoundly versed in literary antiquities, him in a state of constant warfare with his but of a jealous, irritable temper, which kept brother-collectors. He was in diet a strict Pythagorean, and wrote a treatise against the use of animal food. Sir Walter Scott, writing to his friend Mr Ellis in 1803, remarks: 'Poor Ritson is no more. All his vegetable soups and puddings have not been able to avert the evil day, which, I understand, was preceded by madness.' Scott has borne ample testimony to the merits of this unhappy gleaner in the by-paths of literature. REV. GILBERT WHITE. The REV. GILBERT WHITE (1720-1793) published a series of letters addressed by him to Pennant and Daines Barrington, descriptive of the natural objects and appearances of the parish of Selborne in Hampshire. White was rector of this parish, and had spent in it the greater part of his life, engaged in literary occupations and the study of nature. His minute and interesting facts, the entire devotion of the amiable author to his subject, and the easy elegance and simplicity of his style, render White's History a universal favourite-something like Izaak Walton's book on Angling, which all admire, and hundreds have endeavoured to copy. The retired naturalist was too full of facts and observations to have room for sentimental writing, yet in sentences like the following-however humble be the theme-we may trace no common power of picturesque painting: The Rooks returning to their Nests. The evening proceedings and manoeuvres of the rooks are curious and amusing in the autumn. Just before dusk, they return in long strings from the foraging of the day, and rendezvous by thousands over Selborne down, where they wheel round in the air, and sport and dive in a playful manner, all the while exerting their voices, and making a loud cawing, which, being blended and softened by the distance that we at the village are below them, becomes a confused noise or chiding; or rather a pleasing murmur, very engaging to the imagination, and not unlike the cry of a pack of hounds in hollow echoing woods, or the rushing of the wind in tall trees, or the tumbling of the tide upon a pebbly shore. When this ceremony is over, with the last gleam of day they retire for the night to the deep beechen woods of Tisted and Ropley. We remember a little girl, who, as she was going to bed, used to remark on such an occurrence, in the true spirit of physico-theology, that the rooks were saying their prayers; and yet this child was much too young to be aware that the Scriptures have said of the Deity, that 'he feedeth the ravens who call upon him.' The migration of the swallows, the instincts of animals, the blossoming of flowers and plants, JOSEPH RITSON (1752-1803), a zealous literary and the humblest phenomena of ever-changing nature, are recorded by Gilbert White in the parts, becomes now vast masses of wood and an extent same earnest and unassuming manner. of forest. REV. WILLIAM GILPIN-SIR UVEDALE PRICE. Among works on the subject of taste and beauty, in which philosophical analysis and metaphysics are happily blended with the graces of refined thought and composition, are the writings of the REV. WILLIAM GILPIN (1724-1804) and SIR UVEDALE PRICE (1747-1829). The former was author of Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Observations on Picturesque Beauty, as connected with the English lakes and the Scottish Highlands. As vicar of Boldre, in the New Forest, Hampshire, Mr Gilpin was familiar with the characteristics of forest scenery, and his work on this subject (1791) is equally pleasing and profound-a storehouse of images and illustrations of external nature, remarkable for their fidelity and beauty, and an analysis 'patient and comprehensive, with no feature of the chilling metaphysics of the schools.' His Remarks on Forest Scenery consist of a description of the various kinds of trees. 'It is no exaggerated praise,' he says, 'to call a tree the grandest and most beautiful of all the productions of the earth. In the former of these epithets nothing contends with it, for we consider rocks and mountains as part of the earth itself. And though among inferior plants, shrubs, and flowers, there is great beauty, yet, when we consider that these minuter productions are chiefly beautiful as individuals, and are not adapted to form the arrangement of composition in landscape, nor to receive the effect of light and shade, they must give place in point of beauty-of picturesque beauty at least-to the form, and foliage, and ramification of the tree. Thus the splendid tints of the insect, however beautiful, must yield to the elegance and proportion of animals which range in a higher class.' Having described trees as individuals, he considers them under their various combinations, as clumps, park-scenery, the copse, glen, grove, the forest, &c. Their permanent and incidental beauties in storm and sunshine, and through all the seasons, are afterwards delineated in the choicest language, and with frequent illustration from the kindred pages of the poets; and the work concludes with an account of the English forests and their accompaniments-lawns, heaths, forest distances, and sea-coast views; with their proper appendages, as wild horses, deer, eagles, and other picturesque inhabitants. As a specimen of Mr Gilpin's manner-though a very inadequate one-we subjoin his account of the effects of the sun, 'an illustrious family of tints,' as fertile sources of incidental beauty among the woods of the forest : Sunrise and Sunset in the Woods. The first dawn of day exhibits a beautiful obscurity. When the east begins just to brighten with the reflections only of effulgence, a pleasing progressive light, dubious and amusing, is thrown over the face of things. A single ray is able to assist the picturesque eye, which by such slender aid creates a thousand imaginary forms, if the scene be unknown, and as the light steals gradually on, is amused by correcting its vague ideas by the real objects. What in the confusion of twilight perhaps seemed a stretch of rising ground, broken into various As the sun begins to appear above the horizon, another change takes place. What was before only form, being now enlightened, begins to receive effect. This effect depends on two circumstances the catching lights which touch the summits of every object, and the mistiness in which the rising orb is commonly enveloped. The effect is often pleasing when the sun rises in unsullied brightness, diffusing its ruddy light over the upper parts of objects, which is contrasted by the deeper shadows below; yet the effect is then only transcendent when he rises accompanied by a train of vapours in a misty atmosphere. Among lakes and mountains, this happy accompaniment often forms the most astonishing visions, and yet in the forest it is nearly as great. With what delightful effect do we sometimes see the sun's disk just appear above a woody hill, or, in Shakspeare's language, Stand tiptoe on the misty mountain's top and dart his diverging rays through the rising vapour. The radiance, catching the tops of the trees as they hang midway upon the shaggy steep, and touching here and there a few other prominent objects, imperceptibly mixes its ruddy tint with the surrounding mists, setting on fire, as it were, their upper parts, while their lower skirts are lost in a dark mass of varied confusion, in which trees and ground, and radiance and obscurity, are all blended together. When for it is always a vanishing scene-it furnishes an eye is fortunate enough to catch the glowing instant idea worth treasuring among the choicest appearances of nature. Mistiness alone, we have observed, occasions a confusion in objects which is often picturesque; but the glory of the vision depends on the glowing lights which are mingled with it. the Landscape-painters, in general, pay too little attention to the discriminations of morning and evening. We are often at a loss to distinguish in pictures the rising from the setting sun, though their characters are very different both in the lights and shadows. The ruddy lights, indeed, of the evening are more easily distinguished, the shadows of the evening are much less opaque than but it is not perhaps always sufficiently observed that those of the morning. They may be brightened perhaps by the numberless rays floating in the atmosphere, which are incessantly reverberated in every direction, and may continue in action after the sun is set; whereas in the morning the rays of the preceding day having subsided, no object receives any light but from the immediate lustre of the sun. Whatever becomes of the theory, the fact I believe is well ascertained. The incidental beauties which the meridian sun exhibits are much fewer than those of the rising sun. In summer, when he rides high at noon, and sheds his shadow to balance such a glare of light, no contrast to perpendicular ray, all is illumination; there is no oppose it. The judicious artist, therefore, rarely represents his objects under a vertical sun. And yet no species of landscape bears it so well as the scenes of the forest. The tuftings of the trees, the recesses among them, and the lighter foliage hanging over the darker, may all have an effect under a meridian sun. I speak chiefly, however, of the internal scenes of the forest, which bear such total brightness better than any other, as in them there is generally a natural gloom to balance it. The light obstructed by close intervening trees will rarely predominate; hence the effect is often fine. A strong sunshine striking a wood through some fortunate chasm, and reposing on the tuftings of a clump, just removed from the eye, and strengthened by the deep shadows of the trees behind, appears to great advantage; especially if some noble tree, standing on the foreground in deep shadow, flings athwart the sky its dark branches, here and there illumined with a splendid touch of light. In an open country, the most fortunate circumstance that attends a meridian sun is cloudy weather, which occasions partial lights. Then it is that the distant forest scene is spread with lengthened gleams, while the other parts of the landscape are in shadow; the tuftings of trees are particularly adapted to catch this effect with advantage; there is a richness in them from the strong opposition of light and shade, which is wonderfully fine. A distant forest thus illumined wants only a foreground to make it highly picturesque. A Ás the sun descends, the effect of its illumination becomes stronger. It is a doubt whether the rising or the setting sun is more picturesque. The great beauty of both depends on the contrast between splendour and obscurity. But this contrast is produced by these different incidents in different ways. The grandest effects of the rising sun are produced by the vapours which envelop it-the setting sun rests its glory on the gloom which often accompanies its parting rays. depth of shadow hanging over the eastern hemisphere gives the beams of the setting sun such powerful effect, that although in fact they are by no means equal to the splendour of a meridian sun, yet through force of contrast they appear superior. A distant forest scene under this brightened gloom is particularly rich, and glows with double splendour. The verdure of the summer leaf, and the varied tints of the autumnal one, are all lighted up with the most resplendent colours. recess The internal parts of the forest are not so happily disposed to catch the effects of a setting sun. The meridian ray, we have seen, may dart through the openings at the top, and produce a picture, but the flanks of the forest are generally too well guarded against its horizontal beams. Sometimes a fronting the west may receive a beautiful light, spreading in a lengthened gleam amidst the gloom of the woods which surround it; but this can only be had in the outskirts of the forest. Sometimes also we find in its internal parts, though hardly in its deep recesses, splendid lights here and there catching the foliage, which though in nature generally too scattered to produce an effect, yet, if judiciously collected, may be beautiful on canvas. We sometimes also see in a woody scene coruscations like a bright star, occasioned by a sunbeam darting through an eyelet-hole among the leaves. Many painters, and especially Rubens, have been fond of introducing this radiant spot in their landscapes. But in painting, it is one of those trifles which produces no effect, nor can this radiance be given. In poetry, indeed, it may produce a pleasing image. Shakspeare hath introduced it beautifully, where, speaking of the force of truth entering a guilty conscience, he compares it to the sun, which Fires the proud tops of the eastern pines, And darts his light through every guilty hole. It is one of those circumstances which poetry may offer to the imagination, but the pencil cannot well produce to the eye. The Essays on the Picturesque, by Sir Uvedale Price, were designed by their accomplished author to explain and enforce the reasons for studying the works of eminent landscape-painters, and the principles of their art, with a view to the improvement of real scenery, and to promote the cultivation of what has been termed landscape-gardening. He examined the leading features of modern gardening, in its more extended sense, on the general principles of painting, and shewed how much the character of the picturesque has been neglected, or sacrificed to a false idea of beauty. The best edition of these Essays, improved by the author, is that of 1810. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder published editions of both Gilpin and Price-the latter a very handsome volume, 1842with a great deal of additional matter. Besides his Essays on the Picturesque, Sir Uvedale has written essays on Artificial Water, on House Decorations, Architecture, and Buildings-all branches of his original subject, and treated with the same taste and elegance. The theory of the author is, that the picturesque in nature has a character separate from the sublime and the beautiful; and in enforcing and maintaining this, he attacked the style of ornamental gardening which Mason the poet had recommended, and Kent and Brown, the great landscape improvers, had reduced to practice. Some of Price's positions have been overturned by Dugald Stewart in his Philosophical Essays; but the exquisite beauty of his descriptions must ever render his work interesting, independently altogether of its metaphysical or philosophical distinctions. His criticism of painters and paintings is equally able and discriminating; and by his works we consider Sir Uvedale Price has been highly instrumental in diffusing those just sentiments on matters of taste, and that improved style of landscape-gardening, which so eminently distinguish the English artists and aristocracy of the present times. Picturesque Atmospheric Effects. It is not only the change of vegetation which gives to autumn its golden hue, but also the atmosphere itself, and the lights and shadows which then prevail. Spring has its light and flitting clouds, with shadows equally flitting and uncertain; refreshing showers, with gay and genial bursts of sunshine, that seem suddenly to call forth and to nourish the young buds and flowers. In autumn all is matured; and the rich hues of the ripened fruits and of the changing foliage are rendered still richer by the warm haze, which, on a fine day in that season, spreads the last varnish over every part of the picture. In winter, the trees and woods, from their total loss of foliage, have so lifeless and meagre an appearance, so different from the freshness of spring, the fullness of summer, and the richness of autumn, that many, not insensible to the beauties of scenery at other times, scarcely look at it during that season. tracted circle which the sun then describes, however unwished for on every other consideration, is of great advantage with respect to breadth, for then, even the mid-day lights and shadows, from their horizontal direction, are so striking, and the parts so finely illuminated, and yet so connected and filled up by them, that I have many times forgotten the nakedness of the trees, from admiration of the general masses. In summer the exact reverse is the case; the rich clothing of the parts makes a faint impression, from the vague and general glare of light without shadow. Twilight. But the con There are some days when the whole sky is so full of jarring lights, that the shadiest groves and avenues hardly preserve their solemnity; and there are others, when the atmosphere, like the last glazing of a picture, softens into mellowness whatever is crude throughout the landscape. Milton, whose eyes seem to have been most sensibly affected by every accident and gradation of light (and that possibly in a great degree from the weakness, and consequently the irritability of these organs), speaks always of twilight with peculiar pleasure. He has even reversed what Socrates did by philosophy; he |