An interesting critique upon the Ode, with the whole of Ambrose Philips' spirited translation of it, is to be met with in the two hundred and twenty-ninth number of the Spectator. Yours, &c.

UDOCH.

For the Southern Literary Messenger.

THE FINE ARTS.

No. II.

——If the painter saw
Naught but the prose of things, and dared but draw
The literal, aged, uninspiring truth,
And saw not nature in her winged youth
Her rainbow aspect, when she stands array'd
In floods of sunshine and in nights of shade,
What would he gain?—Barry Cornwall.

In my last number, I undertook to show, that "uncultivated taste, is incapable of estimating excellence in art" and that, "the beautiful in nature, like philosophy and science, can only be comprehended by those who study it profoundly and observe it habitually." But those who think nature an unveiled beauty to be gazed upon by every wanton eye, or that the arts aspire no higher than the "prose of things;" those who are resolved to admire what they like, rather than learn to like that which is admirable, may spare themselves the trouble of reading this article,—as my object is, to instruct the teachable, to ramble with the lover of nature amidst the shades of rural life, and converse with the amateur of art, about all that is excellent in ancient or modern works.

Before we can perceive what is beautiful in art, we must comprehend what is beautiful in nature; and without entering into the abstruse question of beauty, which has so much divided the erudite in all ages, we may say, that every thing from the hand of the Creator is beautiful in its proper place: and it is precisely this, that is beautiful in art. But to know the place where beauteous nature lurks, and to trace the harmony and fitness of every object to the part it supplies in the picturesque of scenery, requires a mind

"——by nature's charms impress'd,
An ardor ever burning in the breast,
A zeal for truth, a power of thought intense;
A fancy, flowering on the stems of sense;
A mem'ry as the grave retentive, vast
That holds to rise again, the imprison'd past."