[10]. From the New Monthly Magazine.
[11]. See an Essay on the Genius of Hogarth, by C. Lamb.
[12]. One would think that a people so devoted to perfumes, who deal in essences and scents, and have fifty different sorts of snuffs, would be equally nice, and offended at the approach of every disagreeable odour. Not so. They seem to have no sense of the disagreeable in smells or tastes, as if their heads were stuffed with a cold, and hang over a dunghill, as if it were a bed of roses, or swallow the most detestable dishes with the greatest relish. The nerve of their sensibility is bound up at the point of pain. A Frenchman (as far as I can find) has no idea answering to the word nasty; or if he has, feels a predilection for, instead of an aversion to, it. So in morals they bid fair to be the Sybarites of the modern world. They make the best of every thing (which is a virtue)—and treat the worst with levity or complaisance (which is a vice). They harbour no antipathies. They would swallow Gil Blas’s supper as a luxury, and boast of it afterwards as a feat. Their moral system is not sustained by the two opposite principles of attraction and repulsion, for they are shocked at nothing: what excites horror or disgust in other minds, they consider as a bagatelle; it is resolved into an abstraction of agreeable sensations, a source of amusement. There is an oil of self-complacency in their constitutions, which takes the sting out of evil, and neutralizes the poison of corruption. They, therefore, can commit atrocities with impunity, and wallow in disgrace without a blush, as no other people can. There is Monsieur Chateaubriand, for instance. Who would not suppose that the very echo of his own name would hoot him out of the world? So far from it, his pamphlet On the Censorship has just come to a third edition, and is stuck all over Paris!
[13]. This is not correct; there is no foot-path in France, but there is a side-path, claiming, I presume, the same privileges.
[14]. ‘There is nothing which an Englishman enjoys so much as the pleasure of sulkiness.’—Edinburgh Review, No. 80.
[15]. We may trace something of their national origin in both their minds. In Claude there is the French finicalness, and love of minute details; but there is a fusion of all these into the most perfect harmony from the influence of a southern sky, and he has none of the flimsiness or littleness of effect, to which his countrymen are prone. Again, it cannot be denied that there is a certain setness and formality, a didactic or prosing vein in Nicolas Poussin’s compositions. He proceeds on system, has a deliberate purpose to make out, and is often laboured, monotonous, and extravagant. His pictures are the finest subjects in the world for French criticism—to point the moral, or detach an episode. He is somewhat pedantic and over-significant, in the manner of French orators and poets. He had, like his countrymen, no great eye for nature or truth of expression; but he had what they chiefly want—imagination, or the power of placing himself in the circumstances of others. Poussin, in fact, held a middle place between Raphael and other painters of the Italian school, who have embodied the highest poetry of expression, and the common run of French artists, whose utmost stretch of invention reaches no farther than correctness in the costume and chronology of their subject.
[16]. It is at Florence.
[17]. Is not a monkey grave when it is doing nothing, or when it is not employed in mischief?
[18]. The French phrase for being present at a play is, to assist at it. It must be owned that there is some appearance of truth in the expression.
[19]. Inventor of the Diorama.