coming an author or an artist. He has drifted
into a quiet little backwater, and congratulates himself in all
sincerity on his escape from the turbulent stream outside. He drinks in
the delight of rest at every pore; reduces himself for the time to the
state of a polyp drifting on the warm ocean stream, and becomes a
voluptuous hermit. He calls up the old days when he acted up to his
principles, and found pleasure enough in endless meditation and quiet
observation of nature. He preaches most edifyingly on the
disappointments, the excitements, the rough impacts of hard facts upon
sensitive natures, which haunt the world outside, and declares, in all
sincerity, 'this sort of dreaming existence is the best; he who quits it
to go in search of realities generally barters repose for repeated
disappointments and vain regrets.' He is sincere, and therefore
eloquent; and we need not, unless we please, add the remark that he
enjoys rest because it is a relief from toil; and that he will curse the
country as heartily as any man if doomed to entire rest. This meditation
on the phenomena of his own sensations leads him often into interesting
reflections of a psychological kind. He analyses his own feelings with
constant eagerness, as he analyses the character of his enemies. A good
specimen is the essay 'On Antiquity' in the 'Plain Speaker,' which
begins with some striking remarks on the apparently arbitrary mode in
which some objects and periods seem older to us than others, in defiance
of chronology. The monuments of the Middle Ages seem more antique than
the Greek statues and temples with their immortal youth. 'It is not the
full-grown, articulated, thoroughly accomplished periods of the world
that we regard with the pity or reverence due to age, so much as those
imperfect, unformed, uncertain periods which seem to totter on the verge
of non-existence, to shrink from the grasp of our feeble imagination, as
they crawl out of, or retire into the womb of time, of which our utmost
assurance is to doubt whether they ever were or not.' And then, as
usual, he passes to his own experience, and meditates on the changed
aspect of the world in youth and maturer life. The petty, personal
emotions pass away, whilst the grand and ideal 'remains with us
unimpaired in its lofty abstraction from age to age.' Therefore, though
the inference is not quite clear, he can never forget the first time he
saw Mrs. Siddons act, or the appearance of Burke's '