As to the condition of the people, had it not terminated in misery? As to literature, in mediocrity? As to morals, in utter depravity? As to religion, in mere hypocrisy? Was not the France of the regency, although much more orderly, yet much more corrupt and vicious at heart than the France depicted by Tallemant Des Réaux ?

These are common-place reflections we own, but they are such as these volumes, portraying an age of which the history is little studied by English readers, naturally suggest ; and it cannot be altogether useless to recall these old-fashioned doctrines now and then to our minds, tempted as many are to swerve from their allegiance to them whenever they hear that an émeute has broken out in Paris, or that an American state refuses to pay its debts.

ARTICLE IX.

Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santo. Von J. D. PASSAVANT. Leipzig, 1839.

We are told by philosophers at home, that a coarse materialism is the characteristic of our age beyond all precedent in modern history; by critics abroad, that the same reproach attaches to our country beyond all comparison with the other nations of civilized Europe. If the former charge be supposed to prove the progress of the few rather than the retrocession of the many, the latter we fear has too much foundation to be so hastily and lightly dismissed. It is at least a suspicious coincidence, that we are neither the last to observe, nor the first to extenuate, in our younger brethren of the new world, the very faults and failings which foreigners discover in ourselves. We can see without difficulty, and censure without sparing, the coarseness of their manners, the mercantile tone of their minds, the obstinacy of their prejudices, the vulgarity of their tastes, their national blindness and their national vanity, their slavish devotion to gain and comparative indifference to all higher and nobler pursuits; we are too apt to forget, that though in a new and more favourable soil these bane

ful shoots may have put forth a stronger growth, the parent stocks must have been derived from, and may possibly still exist among, ourselves.

We are glad to believe we possess as a nation a store of sterling virtues, sufficient, it may be, to excuse us from envying our neighbours, certainly too well known to ourselves to require enumeration or proof, but we fear that we are singularly deficient in that delicacy of physical organization which seems to confer a kind of instinctive taste upon the senses and endow them with an intuitive perception of the beautiful. We are still content to borrow our fashions from France, our music from Germany, our choicest paintings from Holland or Italy, our models of sculpture and architecture from ancient Greece and Rome. Our claims to the invention or even the improvement of the Gothic are by no means established, and it seems but too probable that further research may end in reducing them to that degenerate afterform, in which, as is usual with us, elaborate finish and superfluous ornament are the poor substitutes for beauty of outline and grandeur of proportion. Like the Romans of old, whose modern representatives we are, the Romans of trade instead of the Romans of war, we patronize the fine arts themselves as ministers to our vanity and luxury, rather than cherish them as the children of our taste. We purchase our pictures and statues as mere articles of furniture, and value them mostly for their rarity or price. We employ our sculptors only to carve our busts or our monuments, our painters to immortalize our coats and our faces, and graciously permit our engravers to multiply both for the satisfaction of a generous public. Even the sciences we cultivate, the discoveries we make, have all some utility in view, are all made to minister to some material end. Each succeeding year witnesses improvements in our machines and manufactures, which only seem final till they are replaced by new. We have subdued the ancient elements-the fire, the water and the wind, taught them to labour in our factories and work upon our roads; and ele ments the ancients scarcely knew have yielded to mechanica a submission they still withhold from philosophy. Magne tism has long been our pilot; but modern ingenuity has

taught the light to paint our miniatures, made electricity a die-sinker and seal-engraver, and trained galvanism to run our errands with a speed that outstrips the very wind.

But while the sciences of matter have been cultivated with a success so brilliant both in theory and application, while chemistry, geology and political economy have been advancing with giant strides from infancy to manhood, and astronomy has only paused for want of materials to work on, the more abstract sciences have been, if not despised, at least neglected; we are still content to go to the Germans for our criticism, even when Shakspeare is the subject,-to borrow their lexicons and grammars, translate their science and history, retail their theology in revised and expurgated editions, and laugh at their metaphysics when we find it too difficult to understand them. While works of light literature issue from the press, of so flimsy a texture and at so rapid a rate as well nigh to suggest the suspicion that they had been composed as well as printed by some new refinement in machinery, and works upon railways on paper almost keep pace with their prototypes in the field, year after year passes away with scarce one attempt to add to the scanty contributions which for more than a century past England has made to the noblest of all studies, the foundation and end of all science-the philosophy of mind. Even Scotland, so long our stay, is silent at last; one after another, Hume, Stewart, Brown and Mackintosh have disappeared, and none have arisen to supply their places. If there be none among us of depth or reach enough to reveal new laws of mind, or simplify those already recognised, there are surely some who might do honourable and useful service in easier and less frequented paths. Hitherto indeed it would almost seem that the rules of Bacon had been better studied or more faithfully observed in less abstruse sciences than in that of mind; metaphysicians have still been builders of systems and framers of theories, the inspired interpreters rather than the patient observers of phænomena; they have hoped to raise a solid superstructure on the narrow foundation of individual experience, and it is scarcely marvellous if they have failed. Larger views, more numerous data are still wanting; and it appears to us that this statistical age. might find a new and congenial employment in the collection

and classification of facts directly or remotely connected with the history and functions of the mind, more especially of such as relate to the peculiarities of its congenital structure or progressive development, and the nature and extent of the influence which education or external circumstances may exert. The intimate connexion between higher physiology and lower metaphysics, hitherto so much and so strangely neglected, might be recognised and improved, experiments instituted yet untried, and the stores of biography and history forced to yield the results of their long experience. Thus, as we believe, principles might be discovered fruitful in further consequences, and what may perhaps seem of more importance, admitting immediate application to practice. What the philosophy of history is become to the science of government, the philosophy of biography might be made for the science of education; the lives of great men, besides the passing admiration of their greatness and the passing desire to emulate it, might be made to yield some lasting insight into the foundation on which it was built. We might learn to distinguish qualities inborn from those which may be acquired; trace the laws of mental succession in the one, and the most favourable circumstances for developing the other. In the vegetable world and among the lower animals we have discovered these laws and conditions, and to a certain extent we are able to command the result. Among those that acknowledge our control, instances of extraordinary excellence are neither so rare nor so insulated as among men. Greece is still a wonder unexplained and unapproached among nations: in the fasti of English genius, Newton, Locke and Milton still remain not only alone, but without a second in their several departments; Shakspeare and Raffaelle stand, sublime but solitary monuments in the history of mankind.

Our ancestors unfortunately seem seldom to have known or required those minute particulars of contemporary genius to which we have learnt to attach so high and just an interest; and when the want arose, the possibility of satisfying it had already passed away. Autobiographies and diaries had hardly yet come into fashion, and friends still retained the antiquated notion that private letters were scarcely marketable as public property. The first compilers of biographies were only too

glad to fill up their scanty list of dates and documents with any materials that industry could collect or tradition supply, and to leave to their critical successors the more difficult and less grateful task of verifying the one and sifting the other.

This is a description, we regret to say, most strictly true in the two cases in which we should most confidently have looked for and most gladly found an exception, in the lives of Raffaelle and Shakspeare. Vasari was born but eight years before the death of Raffaelle, and his great work was not published till twenty years after it. It would be ungrateful to depreciate a work, to which we lie under such great and numerous obligations; but we may be permitted to say, that its value as an authority is principally due to the absence of any rival,—that it owes its just reputation more to the liveliness and simplicity of its style than to the correctness of its facts or the soundness of its criticisms. Of the Of the many memoirs of Raffaelle which have appeared since, few have done more than repeat the same facts with trifling corrections or omissions, and additional panegyrics, not always an addition in value, of their own. Father Pungileoni was the first to commence a better system; he has examined with care the neglected archives of Urbino, and thrown much additional light on the early life of the artist, and the works and character of his father. Fuessli and Longhena, the Italian translator of De Quincy, have collected some curious notices; Rumohr, Platner, Kugler, and other German writers, have contributed much valuable criticism; lecturers descant on his merits, and travellers wonder at his works; still we must admit, that up to the present time no single work has appeared at all corresponding with the present state of Art or the present demands of criticism. M. Passavant has felt this want, and laboured long and zealously to supply it; we wish we could add that in our judgement he had completely succeeded. He has done all that industry could-scrupulously examined received facts, and spared neither time nor toil in quest of new; he has traversed France, Italy, Germany and England, searched their libraries and studied their galleries, and collected a large store of raw materials; but we must own that the master-mind is wanting, to give life and interest to the mass; that his laborious work is another of the class of Mémoires pour servir,