indulge myself by forgetting the present. But I have not yet explained
to you the attitude of my principal figure;" and Warner proceeded once
more to detail the particulars of his intended picture. It must be
confessed that he had chosen a fine though an arduous subject: it was
the Trial of Charles the First; and as the painter, with the enthusiasm
of his profession and the eloquence peculiar to himself, dwelt upon
the various expressions of the various forms which that extraordinary
judgment-court afforded, no wonder that Clarence forgot, with the artist
himself, the disadvantages Warner had to encounter in the inexperience
of an unregulated taste and an imperfect professional education.

CHAPTER XIV.

All manners take a tincture from our own,
Or come discoloured through our passions shown.--POPE.

What! give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazeteer says, lie down to
be saddled with wooden shoes?--Vicar of Wakefield.

There was something in the melancholy and reflective character of Warner
resembling that of Mordaunt; had they lived in these days perhaps both
the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with regard to the
latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent for deep thought
or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though unjustly condemned as
artificial and meretricious in his style, had infused into the scanty
works which he has bequeathed to immortality a pathos and a richness
foreign to the literature of the age; and, subsequently, Goldsmith,
in the affecting yet somewhat enervate simplicity of his verse, had
obtained for Poetry a brief respite from a school at once declamatory
and powerless, and led her forth for a "Sunshine Holiday" into the
village green and under the hawthorn shade. But, though the softer and
meeker feelings had struggled into a partial and occasional vent, those
which partook more of passion and of thought, the deep, the wild, the
fervid, were still without "the music of a voice." For the after century
it was reserved to restore what we may be permitted to call the spirit
of our national literature; to forsake the clinquant of the French
mimickers of classic gold; to exchange a thrice-adulterated Hippocrene
for the pure well of Shakspeare and of Nature; to clothe philosophy
in the gorgeous and solemn majesty of appropriate music; and to invest
passion with a language as burning as its thought and rapid as
its impulse. At that time reflection found its na