tation. Let them fill up the intervals of painting with works analogous to their own pursuits. Let them again take in hand the graver; there is nothing will make them feel more forcibly the effects and beauties of their pencil. Let them not be deterred by the labour. What others have done it is within their power to do. More than fifty of Martegna's engravings from his own works have come down to posterity: those of Albert Durer are still more numerous: Rembrandt's etchings are almost as well known as his paintings. When they have done this, we will venture to assure them that they will have no reason to complain of the prices paid for old pictures, nor to view with jealousy the admiration excited by the works of the old masters. The sale of lord Byron's writings, and of those of the author of Waverley, has not been injured by the taste for black letter, nor the childish pursuits of the Roxburgh Club. The public will be as ready to discover merit in painting as it has been to acknowledge it in literature. If they will turn away the public taste from Raffaelle and Correggio, let them do better. After all, we are not very sanguine of seeing any great improvement in painting and sculpture. The spirit of the times is not favourable to the arts. It is a cold and calculating age in which we live: its tameness and love of order shrink from the wild energy which ever accompanies genius. It prefers the pretty to the great; private enjoyment to public splendor the great masters of art were born in happier days. The taste in architecture of the two periods, marks forcibly the different disposition. Grecian buildings, in which modern art delights, with their horizontal lines and their widely stretched-out fronts, keep the eye ever grovelling near the ground, and

:

amidst the works of men, whilst the spiral line of Gothic architecture, sublime in its irregularity, raises it at one glance from Earth to Heaven.

But though in the present generation we may not hope to see any who will efface the glory of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle yet there are among our painters those who, with due diligence, may become very respectable manufacturers of pictures.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. 1 vol. London, Taylor and Hessey, 1822.

THIS volume is one of the most extraordinary which have appeared for many years. Its contents were published some time back in the London Magazine, and then attracted a considerable degree of attention. We read them at that time,-and our first impression was that we never saw any thing so ill done-so utterly and extravagantly absurd:-for, in the innocence of our hearts and stomachs, we thought the relations of the quantity of opium swallowed to be totally impossible -and therefore conceived the whole to be a fiction, aiming at the extraordinary and horrible, but most clumsily conceived and put together. The moment, however, that we heard from authority which we could not doubt, that the story was true, at least, that it was actually written by an opium-eater,-it changed at once its character and aspect. From being a tissue of German extravagance, it immediately became in our eyes a physical and metaphysical wonder-and, on our second reading, we thought it one of the most interesting, and certainly the very most extraordinary, production that we had ever seen.

The "Preliminary Confessions" possess in our view by far the greater share of both these qualities-for, when once the fact is established that a man can eat immense quantities of opium without causing death, we can very well understand that his visions must be of the most extravagant and portentous description. But that a boy of seventeen should run away from school, and quarrel with all his friends, solely because he was a better Greek scholar than his master-that he should then wander about the country, subsisting by writing love-letters for nymphs and swains whose passion was less bounded than their education-and that ultimately -being, mark you, of a certain station in life, and entitled to some property-he should in London, while possessed of talents and acquirements of no ordinary nature, "suffer for upwards of sixteen weeks the physical anguish of hunger in various degrees of intensity; but as bitter, perhaps, as ever any human being can have suffered who has survived it,”—that these things should happen at this time of day, and to a man actually living among us, is, indeed, cause for wonder and surprise.

The key to the whole we take to be that the author was ab initio a little mad. It may seem, at first sight, unfeeling in us to speak in this way of a person still alive-but if a man chooses to publish his feelings and proceedings, he must expect them to be discussed freely. He has made the public his minute confidant, and the public, consequently, has a right to make remarks on the matter confided. Besides, we do not at all mean physical madness-that calamity which is so awful that it ought never to be spoken of but with the utmost tenderness and forbearance ;-we allude only to that degree of peculiarity which subjects its possessor to be, in conversational language, called mad-which renders his actions utterly

different from those of other people, and prevents their being accounted for on common principles.

The author begins his extraordinary narrative with the causes which occasioned his eloping from school-from which arose his subsequent sufferings. These sufferings from hunger occasioned, some years after, an affection of the stomach which ultimately became so intensely painful, that he flew to excesses in opium,-which he had before used more moderately, as an alleviation. He thereforerecounts the circumstances which led to sufferings so unusual, especially in one of his condition in life. He was, it appears, early a remarkable proficient in Greek -but we will give his early history in his own words. His style is sometimes a little peculiar, but certainly eloquent and rapid:

My father died, when I was about seven years old, and left me to the care of four guardians. I was sent to various schools, great and small; and was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen, I wrote Greek with ease; and at fifteen, my command of that language was so great, that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in Greek fluently, and without embarrassment-an accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which, in my case, was owing to the practice of daily reading off the newspaper into the best Greek I could furnish extempore: for the necessity of ransacking my memory and invention, for all sorts and combinations of periphrastic expressions, as equivalents for modern ideas, images, relations of things, &c., gave me a compass of diction which would never have been called out by a dull translation of moral essays, &c. "That boy," said one of my masters, pointing the attention of a stranger to me, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could address an English one." He who honoured me with this eulogy, was a scholar, "and a ripe and good one:" and of all my tutors, was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. Unfortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to this worthy man's great indignation), I was, transferred to the care, first of a blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic, lest I should expose his ignorance; and finally, to that of a respectable scholar, at the head of a great school on an ancient foundation. This man had been appointed to his situation by College, Oxford; and was a sound, well-built scholar, but (like most men, whom I have known from that

College, coarse, clumsy, and inelegant. A miserable contrast he presented, in my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of my favourite master: and besides, he could not disguise from my hourly notice, the poverty and meagreness of his understanding. It is a bad thing for a boy to be, and to know himself, far beyond his tutors, whether in knowledge or in power of mind. This was the case, so far as regarded knowledge at least, not with myself only for the two boys who jointly with myself composed the first form, were better Grecians than the head-master, though not more elegant scholars, nor at all more accustomed to sacrifice to the Graces. When I first entered, I remember that we read Sophocles; and it was a constant matter of triumph to us, the learned triumvirate of the first form, to see our Archididascalus' (as he loved to be called) conning our lesson before we went up, and laying a regular train, with lexicon and grammar, for blowing up and blasting (as it were) any difficulties he found in the choruses; whilst we never condescended to open our books until the moment of going up, and were generally employed in writing epigrams upon his wig, or some such important matter. My two class-fellows were poor, and dependant for their future prospects at the university on the recommendation of the head-master: but I, who had a small patrimonial property, the income of which was sufficient to support me at college, wished to be sent thither immediately. I make earnest representations on the subject to my guardians, but all to no purpose. One, who was more reasonable, and had more knowledge of the world than the rest, lived at a distance: two of the other three resigned all their authority into the hands of the fourth; and this fourth, with whom I had to negotiate, was a worthy man, in his way, but haughty, obstinate, and intolerant of all opposition to his will. After a certain number of letters and personal interviews, I found that I had nothing to hope for, not even a compromise of the matter, from my guardian: unconditional submission was what he demanded: and I prepared myself, therefore, for other measures. Summer was now coming on with hasty steps, and my seventeenth birth-day was fast approaching; after which day I had sworn within myself, that I would no longer be numbered amongst school-boys.-p. 15-18.

He leaves the school, accordingly-the account of his escape from which is given with great spirit and effect― and goes into Wales;-and here some of his adventures are described with a dash of humour which one would scarcely expect from the general tone of the narrative;-especially his idea of writing in Greek to the Bishop of B gor evidently) who had affronted him by cautioning a çi-devant servant in whose house he lodged against unknown lodgers, "which at the same time," he says, "that

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