ntrude upon personal prejudice. The
notion is too slight, and too slenderly worked out, even for admission
here, if I were not still, my shrewd and mindful reader, sedulously
endeavouring to get rid of all my brain-oppressing fancies: and this,
happening to come uppermost as I write, finds itself caught, to my
comfort. It is commended, if worth any thing, to the musical proficient:
for I might as well think of adding a note to the gamut as of trying to
compose an oratorio.

* * * * *

The authorial mind is infinitely versatile: books and book-making are
indeed its special privilege, forte, and distinguishing peculiarity; but
still its thoughts and regards are ever cast towards originality of
idea, though unwritten and unprinted, in all the multitudinous
departments of science and of art. Thus, mechanical invention, chemical
discovery, music as above, painting as elsewhere, sculpture as below,
give it exercise continually. The authorial mind never is at rest, but
always to be seen mounted and careering on one hobby-horse or other out
of its untiring stud. If the coin of some rude Parthian, or the
fragments of some old Ephesian frieze, serve not as a scope for its
present ingenuities, it will break out in a new method of grafting
raspberries on a rosebush, in the comfortable cut of a pilot-coat, or
the safest machinery for a steamer. _Ne sutor ultra crepidam_ is a rule
of moderation it repudiates; incessant energy provokes unabated
meddling, and its intuitive qualities of penetration, adaptation, and
concentration, are only hindered by the accidents of life from carrying
any one thing out to the point at least of respectable attainment. Look
at Michael Angelo; poet, painter, sculptor, architect, and author: and
if indeed we are not told of Milton having modeled, or Horace having
built up other monuments than his own imperishable fame, still nothing
but manual habit and the world's encouragement were wanting to perfect,
in the concrete, the conceptions of those plastic minds. Who will deny
that Hogarth was a novelist and play-wright, if not indeed a
heart-rending tragedian? Who will refuse to those nameless monastic
architects who planned and fashioned the fretted towers of Gloucester,
the stern solidity of Durham, the fairy steeple of Strasburg, or the
delicate pinnacles of Milan, the praise due to them of being genuine
poets of the immortal Epic? Phidas and Praxiteles, Canova and
Thorswal