the comparative cheapness of labour and means of subsistence."

I close my remarks with their School of Sculpture, where again, though with much diffidence (for it is not from a transient glance that we ought to speak decisively), I feel inclined to award the palm of excellence to the French chisel. Not that they can produce an artist to vie with Chantrey. There was nothing in the Louvre at all comparable to

Y.

THE influence of inanimate objects of perception in awakening those vivid feelings which time or chance may have associated with them, is too striking to have been passed over without some attempt at explanation. The portrait-the letter-or the gift of a deceased friend are cherished by us, as if in them were really condensed all those inestimable qualities on account of which he was dear to us; and, if they happen to be lost, we have an illusive feeling that the pleasurable recollections, of which these inanimate objects were, in a manner, the representatives, are, at the same time, erased from our memory.

We never view the gift of one to whom we were strongly attached when living, or visit those scenes which are hallowed to us by the recollections of departed worth, in fact, we never look at any object that is connected with his memory, with out experiencing a revival of delightful images and feelings, over which, indeed, sorrow throws a shade of melancholy tenderness-the sad ten derness of pleasure to us gone by for ever. "Formerly," said an old man, pointing to the mansion of a deceased friend, "I had only to climb these steps, to forget all the miseries of life;" as if the very steps had imbibed some of the charm of their former owner's virtues. Nor will

this kind provision of nature appear unaccountable, when we observe the wonderful influence of custom and association in inseparably uniting ideas between which there need be no natural kindred; and when we reflect on what it is, in which the real tenderness of friendship consistsnot merely in admiration of virtue or brilliant genius-or in gratitude for repeated acts of kindness—but in that long and cordial intimacy, which more frequently takes root in youth, and on which time has no power save to mature and to strengthen.

It is by the principle of association that writers on the philosophy of mind explain the influence of external objects in suggesting particular trains of ideas: and we know that Mr. Locke maintained, that the fearful ideas we are wont to associate with darkness have really no more to do with darkness than light, but are the offspring of our education in the nursery. As an instance of the effect of association in cementing together ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, we cannot forbear quoting one from Mr. Locke-for the same reason that he gave for mentioning it

its "pleasant oddness." "It is of a young gentleman, who having learned to dance, and that to great perfection, there happened to stand an old trunk in the room where he learned. The idea of this remark

able piece of household stuff had so mixed itself with the turns and steps of all his dances, that though in that chamber he could dance excellently well, yet it was only whilst that trunk was there, nor could he perform well in any other place, unless that, or some such other trunk, had its due position in the room. If this story," proceeds Mr. Locke, " shall be suspected to be dressed up with some comical circumstances, a little beyond precise nature, I answer for myself, that I had it some years since from a very sober and worthy man, upon his own knowledge, as I report it." But perhaps the power which inanimate objects of sense exercise over the combined images of memory is in no instance more strongly evinced, than in the poignant regret we feel for the loss of a thing with which were associated some tender recollections of friendship. From a tendency of the mind to concentrate -to embody, as it were,-in an object, the feelings it may give rise to, we feel, on the loss of such an object, as if a particular amount of pleasurable recollections were, at the same time, rent from the memory.-But this will appear more evident from a perusal of the two following letters. Of the first, we will give but extracts; for there is a warmth of grief expressed in it at the loss of a mere walking-stick, which would appear ridiculous to those unacquainted with the exaggerating disposition of the writer. The other, which professes to explain that vividness of our associate conceptions which is occasioned by the presence of the suggesting object of perception, is given entire. And here it may be necessary to explain the sense in which these two words-perception-conception are used in these letters. By perception is meant, a sensation with a present reference to its cause, the external object: by conception is meant, those states of memory or imagination which may, or may not, have a present reference to external objects.

"You will, I am sure, laugh at my bewailing so bitterly the loss of what is intrinsically of such little value-a walking-stick; but, indeed, you would not, if you could but see the great gap it has made in those musings of memory which served to beguile me, during the many solitary

hours entailed on me by absence from friends. I have told you that it was the parting present of our mutual friend, Harry B-d, and had been our companion at school, at college, and afterwards in our tour through Greece and Italy. I well remember the occasion on which it was given to him. It was during the vacation that followed after the death of the only parent I have ever seen-my father. B. wrote a letter privately to his uncle George, giving him an account of the peculiar loneliness of my situation; on receipt of which, that kind-hearted man took chaise immediately, and brought Harry and me home with him to his hospitable mansion in Westmoreland. We one day had a trial of leaping— an exercise, you may remember, I excelled in. B. made an extreme effort to beat me, and sprained his ankle. Many days passed before he was able to stir out; and he then required the support of this same stick, the loss of which has caused me such heartfelt grief. It was given to him by the worthy parish rector, a constant and most welcome visitor at his uncle's; a man of refined intellect, with the greatest simplicity of manners-who practised without ostentation the benevolent precepts that he preached; a man, indeed, as B. and I had often occasion to remark, very, very different from some of his brethren with whom it was afterwards our lot to become acquainted. Out of respect to this excellent man, B. took the stick with him, on our return to school. In Cambridge, where we first knew you, you may remember the cautious respect with which B. used to lay it by; for it had, in fact, become to us both a kind of memorial of the past pleasure of our boyhood. When we met you in Florence, you recognised it as the inseparable companion of our travels, and, if I mistake not, it was you who then called it B.'s Doppelgänger, without which he could not move."

Here follows a love episode, in which the stick played a very distinguished part; to which, by the bye, we shrewdly suspect the value of the stick was more owing than our friend would be perhaps willing to confess.

"You were one of many friends who lamented the sad ravages the beatings of a heart too big for its case had made in his naturally deli

cate constitution; and you endea voured to cheer the drooping spirits of those who believed, alas! too truly, that they were gazing on him for the last time, by your sanguine declarations of health recovered under the balmy influence of a southern sky. I accompanied him to Plymouth. There was a forced kind of merriment in our conversation at parting, that ill accorded with the sadness which sat heavily on our hearts; and, although Harry tried to elicit some flashes from his playful wit, the faint gleams served but to throw a melancholy lustre over his pallid countenance, so as to remind us of the phosphoric flame which is said to flit round the decaying tenants of the charnel-house. We were both silently gazing on our old companion-the stick, when he was summoned on board. He sprang upput the stick in my hand. Take this,' said he, it may remind you of the many delightful scenes we have visited together-it will prevent you forgetting a friend who-while-' He averted his head-his lip quivereda tear moistened his eye-he faulteringly squeezed my hand, and dropped into the boat. The vessel got under weigh, and soon melted from my sight I have twice visited his grave at Naples.

"During the many years of gloom that have since rolled by, and when the bleakness of my solitary and wandering life has made me droop or feel unhappy, the sad but delightful reveries which the sight of that stick always induced-the oases of the dreary desert of my existence-never failed to cheer and revive me. When the weather did not admit of my taking it out to walk with me, I used to place it opposite to me after dinner, and sit for hours rehearsing the many mellowed emotions of joy and woe that were associated with it. I knew it in my boyhood-it was a chum in college, and a companion in my travels; and it witnessed the torture, the gloom, which ensued from my ill-placed attachment-the cause of the dark shadowings of my subsequent existence."

Here follows an account of the most vivid of these associate recollections, which are, in fact, a history of the writer's life, but are too long

for extract.

"From you, my dear R. the last

of a knot of five of us who used to meet at poor Harry B-d's chamhers, and who afterwards met amid the ruins of the Eternal City,' I expect a long letter of consolation; perhaps you could devise some expedient that might alleviate this, believe me, the most trying misfortune of my chequered life. Indeed, I am almost tempted to cry out with Lear, You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief, as age; wretched in both. "Write soon, and direct as usual."

My dear friend,

I heartily sympathize with you on the loss of your old ivory-headed companion, and readily enter into the feelings its absence must occasion you; for I know where the spring lies whence these feelings flow.

They indirectly arise from a tendency of our nature (which your friend, J— L—, would call the prosopopoeiaising tendency) to animate, when vividly excited, those external objects that give rise to our emotions, or with which long acquaintance has made us familiar; a tendency, to which the bold personifications of poetry owe their charm, and which, if I mistake not, has been given as an instance of the tacit influence of an innate disposition to ascribe the changes of the external universe to a spiritual or mental agency. It is well described by Akenside, when he speaks of

The charm That searchless Nature o'er the sense of man Diffuses,-to behold in lifeless things The inexpressive semblance of himself, Of thought and passion.

But, though I am perfectly alive to the pain which the loss of your stick inflicts upon you, I cannot admit that it is irreparable; for I will not readily believe, that the associations, on account of which the stick was cherished by you, were embodied so exclusively in it, as to render all other modes of appealing to the memory ineffectual. Habit, I am aware, had rendered it in some measure essential to your comfort. It was so identified with the incidents of your eventful life, that it was, in fact, a symbolic history of your heart's strongest feelings; and, like an Egyptian hieroglyphic, through the influence of time, had become, in a manner, the sole record of the re

volutions which age and circum stances had produced in the empire of your affections. This being the case, it would be foolish to offer you as a substitute any similar object, with the hope that it might in time succeed as representative of the va rious emotions which were associated with its predecessor. Such another stick would, I fear, only remind you of your loss, without suggesting those inestimable remembrances which ren dered the other so valuable to you. Not that, if you feel inclined, I would altogether dissuade you from a trial; it is probable you would ul timately succeed in investing the new stick with a great relative value; but not without such pain as would, I am sure, damp the ardour of your perseverance. Material expedients being, then, to say the least, uncer tain, I would recommend you to seek among the internal sources of intel lect for a remedy, which, if it do not altogether assuage the bitterness, may, at least, blunt the keenness of your feelings. It is needless to say, that you cannot do this effectually, without having some conception of the mental progress by which a mere stick has been animated (if I may so express myself) into a vivid representative of your most heart-stirring recollections. I will say a few words on this interesting process, and leave it to your own leisure and reflection to make a more elaborate analysis. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to pre mise to you, that in this, as in all other attempts at an analysis of our feelings, we do not thereby expect, or even wish, to extinguish these feel ings: quite the contrary. The intention of every such inquiry into the nature of any of our passions and emotions is to make them less painful, and, if possible, more purely intellectual: in this we may not suce ceed; but we never fail to render them more vivid and lasting. By thus blending the emotions of the heart with the reflections of intellect, we improve the temper of both; while the feelings of one become more intense and energetic, those of the other are rendered more bland and imperishable. From the temperate deductions of reason our conduct of life derives its harmony; to the feelings of the heart it is indebted for its melody; and what melody is to harmony, is the sad tenderness of

remembered passion to the more purely intellectual feelings of our nature. "Tis true, these inestimable remembrances, which pass soothingly over the mind like the melancholy of soft music, are apt to darken and shut out the glare of every-day mirth; but, in the shade which they throw before them, are to be seen those glow-lights of the heart which are invisible in broad sunshine.

hat

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The apparently disproportioned grief that we feel at the loss of any of the gifts, the sacred gifts of friendship, or for the loss of any object with which we have been long familiar, arises from a temporary illusive belief (which philosophy may lead point out, but cannot eradic the amount of delight which wa sociated with the particular ellor object, is, as it were, deled from the memory by the removal of the object that was wont to suggest it. That object-your stick for instance, had become the embodied representative of those images and emotions of pleasure which casual circumstances had associated with it; and, by being thus rendered the suggester of a par ticular amount of delight, was invested, by an illusive tendency of the mind to reflect back and diffuse over an object, the pleasure or pain it suggested. This illusive tendency of the mind to reflect back the delight or uneasiness which the presence of inanimate objects produces; to invest them, as it were, with its own qualities or feelings, is the cause of the pleasure which your old ivoryheaded companion afforded you, and indirectly of the pain or regret its absence now inflicts on you. To you who are so intimately acquainted with the theory of the acquired perceptions of sight, and of the beauty we ascribe to external objects, it is unnecessary to offer any illustration of this tendency of the mind to dif fuse its own feelings over the objects that give rise to them, and of thereby commingling the associations connected with an object, with its simple perception, so as to give to the complex whole a unity, which indeed requires a dexterous analysis to separate into its elementary feelings. The colours of bodies, which seem to us spread over that wide surface of landscape that terminates in the remote horizon, are, as you well know, mental, not corporeal modifications ;

the effect, indeed, of a few rays of light that impinge on the retina; but an effect only, not a part of the radiance; and you also know that this colour, which exists but as a sensation of our mind, is diffused by us over, and incorporated, as it were, with the objects from which the rays that occasion the sensation flow, which objects, I need not say, are not mind, but matter. This, which is a familiar truth with those accustomed to philosophical investigations, would sound oddly, in fact, paradoxically, to the ear of the multi tude; as would another analogous fact, that the beauty we ascribe to objects exists-not in the objects we name beautiful, but in the mind that perceives the object; that it is the mind alone which is the source of beauty; that objects appear beautiful, because the mind spreads over them, if I may say so, the mantle of its own pleasurable feelings-feelings which, you know, are mostly associate, and thus embodies in those objects termed beautiful the delightful emotions which they serve but to suggest. "If no eye, that is to say, no mind," asks Dr. Brown," were to behold it, what would be the loveliest of those forms on which we now gaze with rapture? A multitude of particles more or less near or remote." "A beautiful object," says the same philosopher, "when considered by us philosophically, like the unknown causes of our sensations of colour in bodies considered separately from our visual sensations, is merely the cause of a certain delightful emotion which we feel: a beautiful object, as felt by us, when we do not attempt to make any philosophic distinction, is like those coloured objects which we see around us, an object in which we have diffused the delightful feeling of our own mind."

If I were not writing to one who is so much better acquainted with the subject than I can pretend to be, I would say something about the origin of our visual feelings, and of our feelings of beauty, which I imagine it would not be a hopeless task to attempt investigating; at least, the elements of our visual judgments are not so difficult to trace. The great principle in our visual feelings is the principle of association, by which the notions derived from touch are suggested immediately by the visual

feelings which co-existed with the sensations of touch; in the same manner, as the words of a language, when a language has been fully learned, suggest whatever the words may have been used to denote. But too much of this with you.

I am sure I have said more than enough on that process of the mind by which it endows inanimate objects with the agreeable (or opposite) qualities of the associate remembrances, which it by accidental connexion, perhaps, is enabled to suggest-arising, as I have said, from a tendency of the mind to reflect back on external objects the images or feelings which they happen to give rise to. There is a part of this process however, and, as it appears to me, by far the most interesting part, on which I will offer a few remarks; to you, who have not read the works of the late Dr. Brown, they will, I presume, be somewhat new; for it is a process which no other writer on the philosophy of mind; that I am acquainted with, has ever attempted to explain, with the exception of Mr. Stewart, whose explanation, as I shall have occasion to show you, is but partly correct. It is to Brown, who, in my mind, is by far the soundest of the Scotch metaphysical writers, that we are indebted for the perfect explanation of this very interesting process; and the following remarks do not pretend to be more than a greater extension, or a more remote application, of the principle laid down by him than perhaps his limits could admit of. The process I mean is that by which the interesting remembrances which perceptible objects, i. e. objects of sense, awaken, are rendered of a more vivid and tender character than the same remembrances when they present themselves as the casual associations of some object of memory; why the group of associate conceptions, which your stick, for example, merely served to suggest, were more vivid and tender when your stick was before your eyes, than when these recollections occur red spontaneously in the absence of that inanimate object. When an air, or song, that is associated with home, or with the scenes or friends that render home delightful, strikes our ear, i. e. becomes an object of sense, the emotions it then excites