e habit, men dexterous in practice, idle in
thought; many of them compelled by ill-ordered patronage into directions
of exertion at variance with their own best impulses, and regarding
their art only as a means of life; all of them conscious of practical
difficulties which the critic is too apt to under-estimate, and probably
remembering disappointments of early effort rude enough to chill the
most earnest heart. The shallow amateurship of the circle of their
patrons early disgusts them with theories; they shrink back to the hard
teaching of their own industry, and would rather read the book which
facilitated their methods than the one that rationalized their aims.
Noble exceptions there are, and more than might be deemed; but the labor
spent in contest with executive difficulties renders even these better
men unapt receivers of a system which looks with little respect on such
achievement, and shrewd discerners of the parts of such system which
have been feebly rooted, or fancifully reared. Their attention should
have been attracted both by clearness and kindness of promise; their
impatience prevented by close reasoning and severe proof of every
statement which might seem transcendental. Altogether void of such
consideration or care, Lord Lindsay never even so much as states the
meaning or purpose of his appeal, but, clasping his hands desperately
over his head, disappears on the instant in an abyss of curious and
unsupported assertions of the philosophy of human nature: reappearing
only, like a breathless diver, in the third page, to deprecate the
surprise of the reader whom he has never addressed, at a conviction
which he has never stated; and again vanishing ere we can well look him
in the face, among the frankincensed clouds of Christian mythology:
filling the greater part of his first volume with a _resume_ of its
symbols and traditions, yet never vouchsafing the slightest hint of the
objects for which they are assembled, or the amount of credence with
which he would have them regarded; and so proceeds to the historical
portion of the book, leaving the whole theory which is its key to be
painfully gathered from scattered passages, and in great part from the
mere form of enumeration adopted in the preliminary chart of the
schools; and giving as yet account only of that period to which the mere
artist looks with least interest--while the work, even when completed,
will be nothing more than a single pinnacle of the hist