MODEBN PROSE WRITERS. 431 



If we proceed to a period nearer our own time, we 

 observe that since the latter half of the eighteenth century 

 delineative prose especially has developed itself with peculiar 

 vigour. Although the general mass of knowledge has been 

 so excessively enlarged from the universally extended study 

 of nature, it does not appear that in those susceptible of 

 a higher degree of poetic inspiration, intellectual contempla- 

 tion has sunk under the weight of accumulated knowledge, 

 but rather that as a result of poetic spontaneity, it has gained 

 in comprehensiveness and elevation and learning how to 

 penetrate deeper into the structure of the earth's crust, has 

 explored in the mountain masses of our planet the stratified 

 sepulchres of extinct organisms, and traced the geographical 

 distribution of animals and plants and the mutual connection 

 of races. Thus, amongst those who were the first by an 

 exciting appeal to the imaginative faculties, powerfully to 

 animate the sentiment of enjoyment derived from communion 

 with nature, and consequently also to give impetus to its 

 inseparable accompaniment the love of distant travels, we 

 may mention in France Jean Jacques Rousseau, Buffon, and 

 Beraardin de St. Pierre, and, exceptionally to include a still 

 living author, I would name my old friend Auguste de 

 Chateaubriand;* in Great Britain, the intellectual Playfair; 

 and in Germany, Cook's companion on his second voyage of 

 circumnavigation, the eloquent George Forster, who was 

 endowed with so peculiarly happy a faculty of generalisation 

 in the study of nature. 



It would be foreign to the present work, were I to under- 

 take to inquire into the characteristics of these writers, and in- 

 vestigate the causes which at one time lend a charm and 

 grace to the descriptions of natural scenery contained in their 

 universally diffused works, and at another disturb the impres- 

 sions which they were desigued to call forth; but as a tra- 

 veller, who has derived the greater portion of his knowledge 

 from immediate observation, I may perhaps be permitted to 

 introduce a few scattered remarks on a recent, and on the 

 whole but little cultivated, branch of literature. Buffon 

 great and earnest as he was simultaneously embracing a know- 

 iedge of the planetary structures, of organisation, and of the 

 laws of light and magnetic forces and far more profoundly 



* [This distinguished writer died July 4th of the present year (1848)J 



srv 



