Notices respecllng New Books. 267 



musician, all who aspire to touch with pure delight the 

 imaginations of others, all generalise; and without gene- 

 ralising, it may be questioned whtther any have attained to 

 high and lasting reputation. 



" Great mistakes have arisen in the philosophy of art (if 

 not iu the philosophy of morals) from confounding a gene- 

 ral, abstract, or common idea or representation, with a 

 vague idea or representation. Now, with respect to art, the 

 difference is very important, amounting in our critical rea- 

 soning?, to as much as the difference between a bust chiselled 

 in the rough, a-nd a finished head of an angel or deity: — a 

 Jesus Christ, for example, can only be exalted above all in- 

 dividual men, by possessing what is common to all good 

 men in character and expression. 



*' Permit me then to fcpeat, that a general representation 

 is not a vagae, but a generic representation : not a repre- 

 sentation of what is hastily seen or carelessly noticed and 

 imperfectly recognised, but a firm representation of what is 

 most frequently seen. What is most frequently seen, is 

 best remembered ; what is common to a species or a genus 

 is more frequenllv seen than that which is peculiar to an in- 

 dividual : and hence we recollect the general character of 

 man or woman, or of the oak or tiie ash, when they are 

 well painted or engraven, more strongly than we recollect in 

 all their details, any particular man or woman, oak or ash, 

 we have seen. 



" To generalise, is therefore to define broadly or compre- 

 hensively ; and every comprehensive definition, such as is 

 proper in a dictionary, must be of this kind : lanouages, 

 like the imitative arts, being modes of imparting informa- 

 tion by exhibiting principled, combinations of thought." — 



'* As we frequently hear the uninformed talk as if they 

 conceived the highest effort of painting was merely to copy 

 ikaturc, as nature appears to them, so it is very common to 

 hear unreflecting people speak of engraving, a.^ if it were no 

 other than an art of copying that of painting : which 

 though a great mistake, is yet a very pardonable mistake on 

 the part of ihuje who have been led into it, when we con-v 



sider 



