he maligns. Still is he ready to be their general
accuser--has not the slightest respect for the accumulated opinions of
the best judges for these two or three hundred years--he puts them by
with the wave of his hand, very like the unfortunate gentleman in an
establishment of "unsound opinions," who gravely said--"The world and
I differed in opinion--I was right, the world wrong; but they were too
many for me, and put me here." We daresay that, in such establishments
may be found many similar opinions to those our author promulgates,
though, as yet, none of our respectable publishers have been convicted
of a congenial folly. We said, that he suspects not his ignorance of
the masters he maligns. Let it not hence be inferred that it is the
work of an ignorant man. He is only ignorant with a prejudice. We will
not say that it is not the work of a man who thinks, who has been
habituated to a sort of scholastic reasoning, which he brings to bear,
with no little parade and display, upon technicalities and
distinctions. He can tutor _secundum artem_, lacking only, in the
first point, that he has not tutored himself. With all his
arrangements and distinctions laid down, as the very grammar of art,
he confuses himself with his "truths," forgetting that, in matters of
art, truths of fact must be referable to truths of mind. It is not
what things in all respects really are, but what they appear, and how
they are convertible by the mind into what they are not in many ways,
respects, and degrees, that we have to consider, before we can venture
to draw rules from any truths whatever. For art is something besides
nature; and taste and feeling are first--precede practical art; and
though greatly enhanced by that practical cultivation, might exist
without it--nay, often do; and true taste always walks a step in
advance of what has been done, and ever desires to do, and from
itself, more than it sees. We discover, therefore, a fallacy in the
very proposal of his undertaking, when he says that he is prepared "to
advance nothing which does not, at least in his own conviction, _rest
on surer ground than mere feeling or taste_." Notwithstanding,
however, that our graduate of Oxford puts his "demonstrations" upon an
equality with "the demonstrations of Euclid," and "thinks it proper
for the public to know, that the writer is no mere theorist, but has
been devoted from his youth to the laborious study of practical art,"
and that he is "a gradua