in the schools of Dante and Ariosto, and whom the Muses recognise as the sister of Salvator Rosa,-stands unrivalled in her department of romance. It is impossible to read this enchanting writer, without following her in all her magic windings. If she traverse the tops of the Pyrenees, along the romantic plains of Gascoigny, or coast the odoriferous shores of Languedoc; up the mountains of Switzerland, or down the vales of Savoy; we are never weary of the journey. If she lead us If she lead us through a forest, at morning, evening, or in the gloom of night, still are we enchained, as with a magic girdle, and follow from scene to scene, unsatiated and untired. II. Rousseau confesses, that when he was forming the plan of his New Heloise, he was anxious to select a country, which should be worthy of his characters. He was, in consequence, some time before he could finally determine upon the province, in which he should lay the scene of that celebrated romance. He successively called to mind the most delightful spots that he had seen; but he remembered no grove sufficiently charming; no glen sufficiently beautiful. The valleys of Thessaly would have fixed his wavering thought; but those valleys he had never seen: and, fatigued with invention, he desired a landscape of reality, to elicit his descriptive powers, and to operate, as a point, on which he might occasionally repose a strong, vivid, and excursive imagination. At length, weary of selection, he fixed upon those vales, and upon that lake, which in early life had charmed his fancy, and formed his taste. Who has not beheld the pictures of his youth, in the first part of his Confessions? and who has not been captivated with the description, he has given, of Geneva and Vevay, the Lake of Lausanne, and the orchard of Clarens? While the remembrance of his journey from Annecy to Turin; the wild and picturesque landscapes of Vevay; the torrents, dark woods, and mountains of Chamberry; with the hermitage of Montmorency, were, at all seasons of his life, the most flattering to his imagination. III. In general description Homer was as great a master, as in the sublime departments of his art. What can be more admirable, than the scenes of harvest and the vintage, with which he has embellished the eighteenth book of the Iliad? As to his gardens of Alcinous, I must take the liberty of observing, that, as they seem to have exhibited an union of the modern kitchen garden of Italy, and the ancient orchard of Greece, they are no more to be compared with Milton's Garden of Eden, than a Dutch landscape is to an Italian one. Hesiod has many descriptions of rural scenery; sketched with all the truth and simplicity of Nature. He deserves the elegant encomia of Heinsius. There are also some fine specimens of landscape painting in Apollonius Rhodius; particularly in those terrific scenes, which announce the approach to Tartarus. It is curious, however, that though Greece had so many poets, and so many objects, which conspire to form the poet, yet none of them, except Hesiod and Aratus, have left any particular indication of their having derived any vivid satisfaction from them. Nor have they left any poem, that can vie with the Fleece of Dyer; the Cyder of Phillips; Drayton's Polyolbion; Grongar Hill; Beattie's Hermit; Pope's Windsor Forest; or Thomson's Seasons. IV. Among the Latins, Virgil excels in the delineation of particular, and Lucretius in that of general landscape. What a passage is the following! Inque dies magis in montem succedere sylvas Lucretius, lib. v. 1. 1370. In that part, too, where he sings the praises of Empedocles, beautiful is the picture, which he draws of the coast of Sicily, and the wonders of Etna and Charybdis. And no finer contrast is exhibited by any of the poets, ancient or modern, than the one, in which he compares the pleasure of being stretched beneath the shade of a tree, or on the banks of a river, with the more costly raptures of a splendid banquet. It has all the feeling of Nature, and all the denial of philosophy: the versification, with the exception of the last line, is flowing; the sentiments are golden sentiments; and, to speak after the manner of painters, the composition is correct, and the colours "dipt in heaven.” Si non aurea sunt juvenum simulachra per ædis v. Lucretius, lib. ii. Virgil,—that great master of the passions, and the best of all the Latin descriptive poets, if we except Lucretius,—was an ardent lover of picturesque imagery. Hence he is, at all times, on the watch to inquire into, and explain the phenomena of Nature; to boast the number of flocks and herds of Italy; the beauty of its groves; the fineness of its olives; the virility of its spring, and the mildness of its climate. In his Pastorals, and his Georgics, we find him sketching with graceful exuberance; while, in the Eneid, many of his individual scenes are drawn with the pencil of a finished painter. The picture of Claude, in the collection of Welbore Ellis, exhibits not more clearly to the imagination, than the language of the Mantuan poet, describing the spot, where Eneas landed in Italy. Crebrescunt optatæ auræ; portusque patescit Jam propior, templumque apparet in arce Minervæ. En. lib. iii. 1. 530. A view at the dawn of day is delineated with all the fidelity of actual observation. Jamque rubescebat radiis mare, et æthere ab alto Aurora in roseis fulgebat lutea bigis: Cum venti posuere, omnisque repente resedit Atque hic Eneas ingentem ex æquore lucum Æthera mulcebant cantu, lucoque volabant. En. lib. vii. 1. 25. Nor is it possible to draw for the eye a more agreeable picture, than that in the first Eneid, which has so often been esteemed a sketch, in miniature, of the bay of Naples. VOL. II. Est in secessu longo locus: insula portum Y |