EXQUISITE NONSENSE. 211 anomalous construction of sentences, the uncouth collocation of words, and the samples of new coinage introduced here and there, place it almost out of all parallel or competition. It is not, however, unamusing to have an opportunity of seeing the two opposite extremes of anything that declines from its best to its worst, by a very long gradation; and the curious reader may form his conjecture at the number of differences of English style, in the descending degrees of merit, that may find room between, for instance, the composition of JUNIUS, and such as that in the following passages: "Colonial fidelity under all changes, and the protection of mother countries, are reciprocal obligations; and with these advantages the functions of society are not difficult to preserve in colonial communities. This is, however, alluding to the possibility of an event confessedly more agreeable cursorily to notice, than formally to anticipate. A crisis the drift of this essay is unexceptionably to caution against rather than accelerate; as the occurrence of it ought in no way or shape to be indispensable to the happiness or safety of any colonial class or colour, and is to be deprecated from an apprehension entertained, not indeed of the loss of these colonies by the change, but of the possibility of their connexions with the parent state, being thereby weakened in the expedient support of a national zeal, a natural allegiance and attachment so useful in colonial relations. An epoch certainly rendered far from being improbable, by a continuance of the protracted policy of the past, instead of a new order of things which West Indian colonial affairs immediately called for." "Barbarous customs, which have disgraced polite nations capable of instructing the world by their wisdom, and fastening to the memory of their existence the meed of celebrity, for the most profound truths and enlightened philosophy." "It would be choking reason to disbelieve the existence of the abuses of power in ancient slavery." "Not, however, to dwell upon the principles of an institution at the beginnings of the same, let us trace the origin of slavery as far as reason and the evidence of nations assimilate with our design, and furnish our sources of conjectare." "The individual unable to provide for himself, is not likely to provide for, nor indeed to be the possessor of a family, consequently his generation very soon passeth away, agreeably to evangelical denunciation." "Having laid the origin of slavery at the threshold of society, I must reconcile this hypothesis with the theory of facts deduced from the ingress of man into the social temple, the sole repository of human wisdom, yet, of all its other systematical efforts, the least able to elucidate the mystery of itself." "Equally difficult it is also, for the enslaved exile to understand our language and ideas, and being destitute of a formation of mind or soul, to repose imperfect conceptions of either, or fasten the recollection of instruction, confidence beyond perpetual superintendence is unattached to their slavery." The fields of this country (the West Indies) are, however, the golden staff of its renown, to trace their rural policy, one must wade through the Augean mire of slavery, I would spare the reader and myself the unpleasing task, if I knew the way of exposing an unprofitable law and deleterious system, by keeping aloof in clean paths." "Behold an expedience founded on the basis of right! an expedience unlike that of our slave-trade, established in one century, and falling to pieces in the next; but an expedience able to keep pace with perpetuity, and exist until invisible time, freighted with the annals of moral transactions, shall have run its incomprehensible circuit; and the mysterious fiat of human existence being revoked, mortal affairs can be no more.” It is irksome enough to have the task of bringing out such a quantity of rubbish to public notice; but we have heard it intimated that the presumption is always against the equity of men of our craft, when they pronounce a book to be ill written, and omit to justify the sentence by formal proof. The excessive wretchedness of the composition of this volume is the more strange and the less tolerable, as the author demands to be regarded as a man of literary attainments. For he quotes the Latin of Horace, even that Horace who wrote in the Augustan age; and tells us how the Greek term corresponding to our word "industry" is compounded, and what it therefore signifies. INFLUENCE OF SCENERY ON THE MIND.* IT has been ascertained, we suppose, by the experience of many self-observant men, that, in a mind partaking * Journal of a Tour in Iceland, in the Summer of 1809. By William Jackson Hooker, F.L.S. 8vo. 1811.. INFLUENCE OF SCENERY ON THE MIND. 213 of that kind of sensibility which is akin to genius, some degree of correspondence takes place between the habitual state of the imagination, and the character of that scene of external nature which is most constantly presented to the senses. Let two persons, endowed with an equal share of sensibility to this external scenery, be allotted to pass seven or ten years of life, especially during its more susceptible periods; the one on the sea-coast, the other generally out of sight of all water but that of the draw-well; the one in a dreary, the other in a cultivated and beautiful part of the country; the one amidst a scene of mountains, rocks, and cataracts, the other on a dead flat, with a heavy regularity of horizon; the one in a deep confined valley, the other on a commanding eminence with a vast and diversified landscape ; and at the end of the term, the state of the imagination, considered as an active power, will be exceedingly different in the two persons; and the quality of the figures, and of the colours, which it will supply to accompany and illustrate the communicated thoughts of the one and the other, will speedily indicate in which of the contrasted scenes each of them has resided. The man whose view shall have been habitually confined to a dull level tract, will perhaps have the most cause to complain of the effect on his imagination. This tract may be extremely rich, and, by a plentiful supply of provisions to the markets, and to the farmers' and cottagers' families, may render to the community a much more important service than that of giving a picturesque cast to the imagination of a musing and susceptible mind; and it must, doubtless, be a man of no ordinary enthusiasm for mental perfections and ideal possessions, that would forego the good things of a dull but plentiful territory, and be willing, during a course of years, to fare like the Highlanders, merely in order to acquire, by means of habitually viewing bold and magnificent scenes, a greater vigour and a richer furniture of imagination. But let the importance of the matter be estimated as it may, the fact will be, that the man of sensibility and genius, who shall have lived a series of years in such scenes, will display in his discourse and writing a more vivid character and power of imagery, than the other man, of equal capability, who shall have spent the same number of years in a dull flat region, where, after residing some considerable time, he will become sensible of a certain tameness stealing over his fancy, correspondent to the monotony of nature around him. By the very constitution of the mind, we are compelled to think in images, -the severest efforts of intellectual abstraction not being able to carry the mind beyond the sphere of ideas of material forms. The images of objects that are the most constantly presented to us, will the most promptly offer themselves to us in the train of thinking, to lend as it were their shape and colour to our ideas, and to furnish endless analogies; and the more that any man possesses the faculty of imagination, the more in proportion, will the series of his thoughts be embodied and clothed in images, and accompanied by analogies. Now it is obvious, what a difference there will be between a series of thought which takes into its train, as it proceeds, the images that have been assembled in the mind from habitually beholding varied, romantic, and sublime scenes, and that series which passes through a mind in which the habitual set of images is chiefly derived from an uninteresting and monotonous scene of the world. GRANDEUR OF ICELANDIC SCENERY. And what has all this to do with Iceland? Why only thus much, that we meant to say, any man of genius who may feel his imagination tamed and sunk in consequence of his having resided a long period in some dull, flat, and (if such an epithet may be applied to any part of the kingdom of nature) vulgar province of our country, may do well, if there is nothing arising from the consideration of time, or money, or health, to forbid him, to make a little expedition to Iceland, where everything will strike him as new, and strange, and marvellous; where the dull tranquillity of his mind will be broken up as by a volcanic commotion; and where such an assemblage of phenomena will rush on his senses, as might almost create an imagination though nature had given him none. The voyage thither will, indeed, by bringing him in view of some of the mountains, coasts, and islands of Scotland, so rouse his faculties and change the state of his ideas, that he will not be suffered to feel, in absolute perfection, the con GRANDEUR OF ICELANDIC SCENERY. 215 trast between a homely but fertile English country-with its meadows and corn-fields, its hedges, high roads, and villages, and here and there a hill or a stone, barely worth half an hour's walk after dinner-and the wild and dreary magnificence of these dominions of alternate frost and fire. Were so sudden or so unconscious a transition possible as to prevent any gradation of ideas, he might well be content to accept this contrast instead of a visit which he, like many other imaginative persons, may have sometimes wished to make to another planet. REIKEVIG, THE CAPITAL OF ICELAND. After several days of rough weather and tiresome beating about, and one instance of imminent danger from a sunken rock, our travellers got fairly into the direction of the bay of Reikevig, the capital of the island, and were carried in by some pilots, whose appearance and manners, as presenting the first moral sample of the country, engaged our author's utmost curiosity. The novelty, the grotesque character of countenance aud dress, and the social, and, as it should seem, friendly disposition, prevented that unmingled disgust which would otherwise have been excited by their extreme filthiness, of which the several offensive marks and circumstances are recounted. They evinced a prodigious power of execution on the ship's eatable stores; and they appeared to recognise, with intuitive sagacity, that great principle of European wisdom, that there is no enduring existence on this side the Atlantic, without the leave and the assistance of planters on the other side; for they testified the liveliest satisfaction at the sight of snuff and tobacco, even the boys of fourteen making interest for a share of the latter. The humblest class of the inhabitants cannot but with extreme difficulty command a little of this luxury; but snuff is in general use, and is employed with so little neatness as to give a disgusting appearance to the visages of the people. ICELANDIC HOSPITALITY. It was, however, in a style widely different from this, that our author and two of his companions were received and entertained by the old ex-governor Stephensen, in the little |