He would rather have applied the Horrido of the Italians than our romantic, to describe the dark and gloomy scenery of Skiddaw, or the cloud-capt head of the sublime and dreary Benlomond. Their Selvaggio would better than our picturesque have conveyed the idea excited in his mind by the wild scenery of the Combs of Devonshire, their shelving banks, their noisy rills almost lost to sight among the thick foliage of the mountain oak.

It is a fact of no little curiosity, that most of our poets have owed their birth to cities. Early associations, the habitual contemplation of the beauties of nature have contributed little to their inspiration. Their poetry has been rather the effect of reflection than the impulse of sensibility. They have oftener wooed the muse amidst the smoke and dirt and noise of London, than in sylvan glades, or amongst rustic scenes. They have been more familiar with the crafty cunning of the town, than with the innocent simplicity of the village. Chaucer was not only a native of London, but his time was shared between poetry and business. It was as a relaxation from the dullness of Custom-house computations that he was induced to follow his pilgrims to the shrine of the martyred saint. Milton was born in Bread-street; the greater part of his life was passed in London; his most intimate communings with the divine Spirit which breathes in all his poetry, were in a garden-house in Holborn. Spenser, Pope, and Gray, lisped their first numbers to the chimes of Bow-bells. The years which Pope afterwards passed amidst the graceful scenery of Windsor Forest gave him, it seems, the inclination but not the talent for pastoral. Green-Arbour-Court might, from its name, lead us to believe that there was something rural in the residence of Goldsmith. A visit to

this scene of wretchedness, between Fleet-market and the Old Bailey, would at once dissipate the illusion. Shakspeare was indeed born in the country, and passed his youth among its sports; but he is not the poet of inanimate nature; he is only great when he struggles with the workings of mind.

The period of formal gardening, of clipt hedges and straight walks, is synchronical with the reign of descriptive poetry. Our poets were only happy in their pictures, when none could judge of the likeness. Pope first introduced a better taste in the laying out of grounds; he first taught his countrymen to admire the picturesque; and the next generation saw Shenstone hopping along his own gravel walks, and chirping the last of English pastorals. The modern race of country-born poets have given themselves, almost exclusively, to narrative, or to the description of manners, which exist but in tradition, of which our knowledge is wholly derived from books; they seldom think of delineating the landscape, with which long acquaintance has rendered them familiar. If they describe, it is India, it is Persia, it is Greece; lands to which they and their readers are equally strangers. The country has, indeed, only become rich in poetical genius, since it has lost its rusticity, since the influence of the Metropolis has pervaded and fashioned the ideas of the remotest villages.

These facts are surely enough of themselves to make us pause before we, in any way, connect the love of the picturesque with that deep and ardent feeling of the beauties of nature, that veneration for her works, which seems to be almost inseparable from true genius, which gives it its noblest character. We may, perhaps, with more truth, ascribe it to the mawkish sentiment of a love of contrast; to the restless feeling which makes us find

satiety in whatever is familiar, and bids us hope for enjoyment from whatever is unknown. We shall be led to conclude that it takes its rise in the refinements of society we shall trace its source not to nature but to art.

Of all the nations of Europe there is none whose state of society is so artificial as that of England; none whose habits of living depart so widely from the models of nature; none so strongly smitten with the love of the picturesque. But this direction of our taste, this alteration in our habits of thinking and acting is entirely of modern growth. It is with the increase of our wealth, and the spreading of our manufactures, that our taste has become more refined. The more closely we are hemmed in by trade, the more we seek to escape its influence. It is only since cotton-mills and iron-forges, erected in every dale, have defaced the natural beauties of the country, that we have become so jealous of what remains; that we have endeavoured to restore in our parks what commerce and enclosures have destroyed in the country; that we seek to mimic what we are no longer able to preserve. The inhabitants of England never thought of making pilgrimages to the wild glens of Scotland, till the spirit of improvement had laid waste all the native graces of their own soil; till the necessities of commerce had checked the wanton and vagrant course of its rivers, and damned them up into canals with their straight lines and sluggish waters. As picturesque scenery has become more rare, its value has become greater in our eyes. We prize it more as we know it less. Our wonder grows with our ignorance.

The most ardent admirers of wild scenery will be found amongst those who lead the most artificial lives;

the works of nature are dearest to those who are least familiar with them; who are chiefly conversant with works of art. The passion burns with the brightest flame in the bosom of the young ladies, who, submissive to fashion's rule, pass the best portion of their lives in the crowded assemblies and tasteless dissipation of London: whose winter, longer than that of Lapland, does not less want the cheering presence of the sun. Each revolving year pours forth, from the murky streets of the metropolis, these fair votaries of nature, armed with sketch books and crayons, and anxious to teach the inhabitants of the country to admire the natural beauties which have surrounded them from their infancy, but which, from habit, have palled on their imagination, and seem to them too common to deserve their curiosity.

It is not difficult to explain why the feeling of those who live constantly in the country should be so different from that of its occasional visiters. Those who never quit the town but on parties of pleasure, who never see the country but in its most beautiful season, when it pours forth in profusion its fruits and its flowers, who relieve the tedium of an occasional wet day with pleasant society, and wear away time amidst the comforts and luxuries of a well-appointed house, never cast their eyes but on the bright side of the medal. The picture stands before them with all the advantages of light and shade. Their recollections of town contribute to embellish the country. The dusky and undistinguishable hue of a London sky serves as a foil to draw out and render more apparent the more vivid colouring of nature. Their own feelings help the delusion; the fresher breeze of the mountains raises their spirits and re-invigorates their jaded nerves. The sentiment of

their own happiness spreads its delightful hue over all the objects in the canvas. They are pleased because they are happy.

To the constant inhabitant of the country these sources of enjoyment are wanting. He has no recollections to enhance the beauty of the present scene. The visionary castles, the imaginary cathedrals, into which the schistus formation delights to fashion the tops and the salient angles of its mountains, are always associated in his mind with the deep and plashy clay at their bottom, through which he has toiled many a winter evening in all the wretchedness of darkness and of cold. The tree which so romantically overhangs the precipice, as if disdaining the support of earth, and ambitious to become an inhabitant of air, has too often, whilst bending and sighing under its growing influence, admonished him to prepare for the utmost fury of the storm. The living spring which gushes from the crevices. of the limestone, and, bounding from rock to rock with all the playfulness of youthful vigour, dashes its sparkling waters into the stream below, presents itself to his imagination in the form of the winter torrent which has so often mocked his labours, and resumed the land which he thought he had won from the bed of the river. The dark and cumbrous masses of granite which encircle the coast of Cornwall, are always connected in the minds of its inhabitants, with the horrors of shipwreck. The western breeze never whispers through the deep chasms of the rock without seeming to waft to their ears the agonizing shrieks of the drowning seamen. These scenes, so delightful to the stranger, excite nd pleasure in the mind of the inhabitants. Their feelings are always mixed with a sentiment of fear, or the recollection of misfortune.