Various

“ Montesquieu is beyond all doubt the founder of the philosophy of history. In many of its most important branches, he has carried it to a degree of perfection which has never since been surpassed. He first looked on human affairs with the eye of philosophic observation; he first sought to discover the lasting causes which influence the fate of mankind; he first traced the general laws which in every age determine the rise or decline of nations. ”

“ What a picture of the first man of his age, living in retirement, asking nothing, noways surprised at being forgot! He knew human nature well who acted thus after writing the Esprit des Loix. Power loves talent as long as it serves itself, when it is useful but manageable; it hates it when it becomes its instructor. Self-love is gratified by the subservience of genius in the first case; it is mortified by its superiority in the last.
But this honoured and happy life was drawing to a close. Shortly after the publication of the Esprit des Loix, the strength of Montesquieu rapidly declined ”

“ It is an absurd assumption of superiority in the critic over all the masters that ever were; as if he alone were able to conceive perfection, to which no painter has ever been able to advance; that perfection on which the critic, or rather De Piles, had his eye, is Number 20; that no Painter has approached it nearer than nineteen. It commences with a falsehood in supposition, that the critic is above the Painter, or Art, or the only one really cognisant of it. The fact being quite the reverse, for we know nothing that we have not been absolutely taught by genius. It is genius that precedes ”

“ We remember in our school days giving Virgil credit for much tact in endeavouring to make a gentleman of Æneas, and succeeding too for a while in raising the more than equivocal character of his hero, by placing him in the picture-gallery of the Queen of Carthage, and giving him leisure to contemplate and to criticise, and poetically to describe to his silent and spiritless lounger-friend many noble and many touching works. ”

“ Nations which had, till then, been only emulous in prostration to the universal conqueror, now assumed the port of courage, prepared their arms, and longed to try their cause again in battle. The outcry of Spain, answered by the trumpet of England, pierced to the depths of that dungeon in which the intrigue and the power of France had laboured to inclose the continental nations. The war of the Revolution has already found historians, of eloquence and knowledge worthy of so magnificent an era of human change. ”

“ If in the country, he is sparingly fed—sees little or nothing of Art, little perhaps beyond the Sign of an Inn—and is scarcely, from other sources of education, taught to look with the mind's eye, through the undignified appearance, to the actual dignity even of the nature he sees:—if he has lived in the city, the Print shops are inevitable lures to cheat him by little and little out of his natural taste, if there be one; for at first it can be but a mere germ. The works of greatness, of goodness, will be the last things that he will see ”

“ Actors and actresses will not know that words written for them, scenery and dresses adapted for them, and attitudes invented for them, can never make them the personages mentioned in the playbill. On returning home, we stood at our balcony gazing on the lovely face of a true Naples night—a night beyond description!—the whole vault of heaven lighted by one light: a full moon, like a subdued sunshine over earth and water. A world of light, that shone on a world of darkness, tinging the air, gilding the mountain-tops, and making the sea run like melted phosphorus. ”

“ Corrupted as our eyes now are, we would venture to assert, that were you to offer, either in prints or originals, to boys of fourth and fifth forms at our public schools, in one hand a vile and gaudy horse and jockey, and in the other a pure and lovely picture by Raffaelle, the former would be taken. Here is a lamentable neglect in education; the ear must suffer the probing and the torture of metres and verse-making, but the eye is left unguarded, unprotected, to shift for itself, or to yield to the fascinations the first pander of evil chooses to offer. ”

“ But then the subject is the loveliest of arts, Painting—embracing as it does the beautiful, the great, and the pathetic, whatever charms the eye and moves the heart—we are sensible of more than common pleasure, and become soothed into dreams and visions of our own, even by the gentle garrulity of a connoisseur. Is there any one who pretends to acquaintance with literature, however uninitiated he may be in the mysteries of the arts, who has not read the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and who has not wished, after reading them, to be enabled to say, "anche io son pittore?" ”

“ We should collect from the whole contents of this volume, that the author was never an enthusiastic admirer of what is termed high Italian art. He seldom dwells upon "the sublime and beautiful." Gifted rather with a complacent acquiescence in what is great, than stirred by it to any heat of rapture, it is probable that at least the sphere of his pleasures was enlarged; and his nice sense of the beauty, touch, and colour, rendered pictures, of subjects of little interest, more pleasing to him, than they could be to the connoisseur of more exclusive taste. ”

“ How striking a proof of human sagacity that the philosophic sage, in the early part of the seventeenth century, should have divined a truth which the researches of the historian and the exploits of the conqueror were to confirm in the middle of the eighteenth!
"Those who are governed by a king," says Montesquieu, "are less tormented by envy and jealousy, than those who live under an hereditary aristocracy. The prince is so far distant from his subjects, that he is rarely seen by them; he is so far above them that nothing in his situation can mortify his self-love. ”

“ I am the younger son of Sir Charles Hastings, Baronet, a general in the army, and who was educated in his youth with the Marquis of Hastings, governor-general of India; so that I could surely find a more lucrative, less dangerous, and more respectable employment in India than that of a spy in Greece. I quitted England because I considered the government treated me with injustice, in arbitrarily dismissing me from the navy, after more than fourteen years of active service, for an affair of honour, while I was on half-pay. ”

“ He opened the box, where lay coiled, and perfectly still, a spotted viper, an immense black snake, and one very light and silvery like an eel.
"Here's my family," said the old man; and catching the viper round the middle, brought him out, while the others wriggled a little, as if in expectation of being caressed in their turn. "This animal, signor, is not so bad in his temper as you have been told. It is only when he is making love that he is poisonous—to all but his females; but in this, gentlemen, he is scarcely worse than many of yourselves, whom it is not safe then to approach." ”

“ We are sorry to read this account of Correggio's celebrated Notte. "Even when they do not destroy the picture entirely, they, at all events, leave the most injurious traces behind, depriving it of its transparency and harmony, and much of the effect, rendering it hard, cold, and weak. Of this the admirable 'Night' of Correggio at Dresden presents a very sad example."
We look upon the audacious man who dares to repaint upon an old picture unnecessarily, and by wholesale, as guilty of a crime. It is the murder of another man's offspring, and of his name and fame at the same time. ”

“ The first burst of the Revolution, like the first use of gunpowder, had only shown the boundless force of a new element of destruction. The Spanish insurrection showed its protecting and preservative power. The tremendous energy which seemed to defy all control, was there seen effecting the highest results of national defence, and giving proof of the irresistible strength provided in the population of every land. What nation of Europe does not possess a million of men for its defence; and what invader could confront a million of men on their own soil? ”

“ To expect in a free state men at once bold in war, and timid in peace, is to look for an impossibility. It may be assumed as a fixed principle, that wherever you see every one tranquil in a state which bears the name of a republic, liberty there has been long since extinct."—C. 9.
The representative system has saved Great Britain and America from these terrible popular comitia, in which, as Montesquieu has truly said, the mobs of the people became the convulsions of an empire; and which tore in pieces Poland in modern, as it had done Rome in ancient times. ”

“ He would become the genius. In the arts, whether of poetry, painting, or music, we know nothing but what practical genius tells us, shows us, teaches us; seldom is it, indeed, that the scholar critic comprehends fully the lessons taught; but to pretend to go before the masters, and to set up a post with his Number 20 marked upon it, and to bid his master reach it if he can, is the puerile play of an infantine intellect, or very conceited mind! ”

“ We have it, on his own authority, that he has made a discovery of unparalleled merit and magnitude, as simple as it is surprising, and calculated, in an equal degree, to benefit mankind, and immortalize its author. He has discovered the science of languages—a science in which the wisest hitherto have been smatterers, but in which the most shallow may henceforward be profound. In the prophetic spirit of conscious genius, Horace, Ovid, and other great men, have boasted of the perpetuity of fame achieved by their efforts ”

“ Frank Abney Hastings, the hero who commanded the Karteria, and John Hane, the gallant officer who fought by his side, now rest in peace. Two volunteers, their friends and companions in many a checkered scene of life, still survive to cherish the memory of the days spent together on board the Karteria. One has acquired a wide-extended reputation in America and Europe, by the intelligence, activity, and we may truly say genius, with which he has laboured to alleviate the sufferings of humanity. ”