and transcendant beauty of King's College Chapel.⚫ It is quite unparalleled.

"that

* Mr. Coleridge visited Cambridge upon the occasion of the scientific meeting there in June 1833. — "My emotions," he said, "at revisiting the university were at first overwhelming. I could not speak for an hour; yet my feelings were upon the whole very pleasurable, and I have not passed, of late years at least, three days of such great enjoyment and healthful excitement of mind and body. The bed on which I slept and slept soundly too was, as near as I can describe it, a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied together. I understand the young men think it hardens them. Truly I lay down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise." He told me the men were much amused at his saying that the fine old Quaker philosopher Dalton's face was like All Souls' College." The two persons of whom he spoke with the greatest interest were Mr. Faraday and Mr. Thirlwall, saying of the former, "that he seemed to have the true temperament of genius, that carrying-on of the spring and freshness of youthful, nay, boyish feelings, into the matured strength of manhood!” For, as Mr. Coleridge had long before expressed the same thought, "To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powe rs of manhood; to

I think Gerard Douw's "Schoolmaster," in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the finest thing of that sort I ever saw; - whether you look at it at the common distance, or examine it with a glass, the wonder is equal. And that glorious picture of the Venus - so perfectly

combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar;

'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman;'

this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure

'To snow that falls upon a river,

A moment white-then gone for ever!'

Biog. Lit. vol. i. p. 85. — ED.

beautiful and perfectly innocent — as if beauty and innocence could not be dissociated! The French thing below is a curious instance of the inherent grossness of the French taste. * Titian's picture is made quite bestial.

I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very palatable to his clients.

I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all.

* I wish this criticism were enough to banish that vile miniature into a drawer or cupboard. At any rate, it might be detached from the glorious masterpiece to which it is now a libellous pendant. — ED.

July 1. 1833.

MANDEVILLE'S FABLE OF THE BEES. BESTIAL THEORY. CHARACTER OF

IF I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant any thing more by his Fable of the Bees than a bonne bouche of solemn raillery, I should like to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest, and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and the world-how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats, those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their fellow mortals.

By the by, I wonder some of you lawyers (sub rosa, of course) have not quoted the

pithy lines in Mandeville upon this Registration question :

"The lawyers, of whose art the basis
Was raising feuds and splitting cases,
Oppos'd all Registers, that cheats
Might make more work with dipt estates;
As 't were unlawful that one's own
Without a lawsuit should be known!
They put off hearings wilfully,
To finger the refreshing fee;
And to defend a wicked cause
Examined and survey'd the laws,
As burglars shops and houses do,

To see where best they may break through."

There is great Hudibrastic vigour in these lines; and those on the doctors are also very

terse.

Look at that head of Cline, by Chantrey! Is that forehead, that nose, those temples and that chin, akin to the monkey tribe? No, no. To a man of sensibility no argument could disprove the bestial theory so convincingly as a quiet contemplation of that fine bust.