420 
ject, on which the conductors of this 
journal seem perfectly at home; another 
of thirty-seven, on Brodie’s History of 
the British Empire, from the Accession of 
Charles I. to the Restoration—another 
documentary counterspell against the 
insidious sophistry and misrepresenta- 
tions of Hume; and, under the title of 
Political Fallacies, thirty-two pages more 
devoted to a publication made up, by a 
friend, from unfinished papers of Jeremy 
Bentham, and two Parisian publications 
of a similar character—one of them, a 
French version of the former. So that 
one would think there was no deficiency 
of proportion in the quantity of pages 
given to subjects protessedly political. 
But, though to the general complection 
of those politics we have no vast anti+ 
pathy, we cannot quitecommend the taste 
of our Westminster Critics, in dragging 
them, again, into a review of Geoffrey 
Crayon’s Tales of a Traveller, Nor can 
we persuade ourselves to consider the 
encouragement of Polite Literature and 
the Fine Arts as a mere conspiracy of 
“the Somebodys” to keep “ the No- 
bodys” in abject distance and degrada- 
tion. We should be sorry to see the 
cause of Political Reform confoynded 
or associated in this country with the 
Hebertism, or Vandalism, that makes war 
upon eyery thing, which can give splen- 
dour, elevation and refinement, to that 
leisure and that luxury, which, inevitably, 
result from so advanced a state of so- 
ciety, as that, in which it is our destiny 
to be placed; and which, in fact, 
offers, even to the laborious class of 
the community, the easiest and the best 
remunerated of those employments, upon 
which they are to depend for their sub- 
sistence. Yet something like this asso- 
ciation we see in what we cannot but 
regard as an ill-placed tirade against 
University education,* and the cultiva- 
tions of taste, in the following passage 
in particular : 
* But as the human mind will employ 
itself on something, and no institution less 
mischieyous than a Catholic inquisition is 
capable of reducing it to total inactivity, a 
substitute must be found for useful inquiry. 
This substitute is polite literature, and what 
are called the fine arts; in other words, the 
cultivation of the powers of the imagination, 
at the expense, and almost to the destruc- 
tion, of the powers of the judgment.” 
With respect to the concluding sen- 
tence of this paragraph, we happen to 
be completely at issue with the West- 
minster yeviewer. The great defect of 
* Not but what some of the observations, 
ou this subject, are sufficiently correct, if 
they had been in their proper place. 
Philosophy of Contemporary Criticism —No. XXXIX.. [Dec.¥, 
modern high education, we conceive to 
be, that the culture of the imagination* 
is too much neglected; that the atten- 
tion is too exclusively confined to the 
mechanical, and what are called strict, 
sciences, and the consequent manufac- 
ture of mediocrity, by. the extinction of 
the superior energies of mind. But 
thus it is, that those, who devote them- 
selves to a particular subject, are apt to 
acquire an egotistical notion, that there 
is nothing else that is worthy of at- 
tention. The classic, the horse-jockey, 
and the political economist, are, in this 
respect, “of imagination all compact.” 
Each of them knows, or thinks he knows, 
one thing well, and persuading himself 
that there is nothing else to know, looks 
down with contempt upon the ignorance 
of those who know every thing, but his 
own exclusive knowing. But the readers 
of the Monthly Magazine, we suspect, 
are no such intellectual exclusionists. 
They have no objection to a little va- 
riety; would like to escape, occasionally, 
frompolitics and political economy, even 
to belles lettres; to “books of poetry 
and amusement’’; to turn, in fact, alter- 
nately, 
‘From grave to gay, from lively to severe:”* 
and, if we cannot find this diversity for 
them among our Westminster friends, 
would excuse us forseeking it among our 
Quarterly enemies. 
Before we do this, however, we ought. 
to observe, that the Westminster re- 
viewer has himself, in a certain degree, 
substantiated our criticism in a very- 
able and judicious article on Whewell’s 
Treatise on Dynamics: a work in which 
the profundity of the mere mathemati- 
cian is obscured, almost to inutility, 
beyond the sphere of scholastic techni- 
cality, and, almost, beyond the narrow 
circle of his own school (that of Trinity 
College, Cambridge), by the justly-cas- 
tigated want of the felicities of compo-' 
sition: felicities, which, without some: 
devotion to polite and general literature; 
can rarcly be attained; and, least of all,’ 
by the laborious plodder in the profound 
and technical subtleties of mathematics. 
The reviewer, while he does justice to 
the general mastery of Mr. W. as far as 
relates to his subject, as justly laments, 
not only, that his crabbed technicalities 
and peculiarities of method (even where 
they have not, as in some instances, led 
him 
* We request the reader not to be so 
unetymological in his apprehensions, as to 
confound, like Dr. Johnson, the essential 
divinity of Imagination with that mere will- 
o’-the-wisp, Fancy, 
