meant for the distant eye. The Theseus is another statue of a hero of somewhat the same kind, and on looking into these things more leisurely, I am inclined to think you will find in it also confirmation of all that I said. In this town, there is at the Drawing Academy, a cast of this Elgin Marble, which I saw only yesterday, and I am never weary of seeing any copy, however faint, of that glorious original. The most remarkable thing about the organization of the Theseus, however, is that the front part of the head is higher than the back part, which is a circumstance that very seldom occurs in Nature. I am not sure whether the form, even of this part of the Theseus, has not been defaced by the weather, and I think that in the cast there is some look of a joining, as if the upper hemisphere of the head had been found separate, and afterwards united to the statue. This is a profound and delicate question, and, as I pass through London, I shall certainly endeavour to have a committee of craniologists summoned together to inquire into the fact-as one upon which the most important conclusions may depend. My own poor opinion is, that the sculptor probably did make the front part of the head higher than, or, at least, equally high with, the back parts. In most human heads, the point of will is the highest part-and from thence there is a slope more or less coming down to the forehead. In the Apollo Belvedere the slope is not much, and the line which it describes is convex and swelling. Now, in the Hercules Farnese, making allowance for the irregularities of the hair, there is no slope, but a level. If you look down on the top of the head of the Hercules, you will find it a very long one. The forehead is far pushed out-the middle is large -and the animal faculties are copious. The head of the Apollo, on the contrary, is far from being long in the same proportion-and it is singular how little the forehead is expanded, when considered in relation to the rest of the head. But I think the ancients had a notion that a small forehead expresses youth.

But the animal faculties, even of the Hercules himself, are quite Lilliputian compared with those of a late hotelkeeper in this town, of whom a bust was taken after his death, by particular request of my friend W. This man's head (bis name was Macculloch,) is shaped exactly like a jelly-bag, the animal propensities, below and behind, having apparently drawn down to them the whole of the

juices, from which his organization above ought to have been supplied. His ears can scarcely be seen for the masses of luxurious prominence among which they are buried, and no mad bull was ever thicker just above the nape of the neck. I think it is much to be regretted, that sucli a person should have died in the prime of life-he must have been a fine living symbol of the Epicureanism—not of the garden -but of the kitchen and the cellar. His forehead is low and retreating, his nose short, and snubbed up at the end-the nostrils purfled and swelled out as they were not the receptacles of air, but apertures made expressly for blowing out the fumes of wine--perhaps tobacco--and his throat looks as if it were never intended to be otherwise than gorged with good cheer. Altogether he bears considerable resemblance to some of the fine old toping satyrs I have seen antique vases. I am told this man was of great use to Edinburgh, by introducing many most striking improvements in all departments of the profession wherein Nature had fitted him so eminently to excel. There was no such thing as a dinner well set down in a Northern tavern, till this great genius's jelly-bag head was set to work, and now I confess the North appears to me to be in all these respects treading fast on the kibes of the South. I think there is no question, the tavern-keepers of Scotland ought to canonize Macculloch as their patron saint, and put up his effigy over their doors, as time out of mind the tobacconists have placed over theirs that of the celebrated Negro, who smoked in one day the weight of his own body in segars.

on

I KNOW not how many days I might have lingered in the delightful society of Ad, bad it not been that I had promised Wto be back in Edinburgh by a particular day

at dinner, and I was the less willing to break my engagement, as I understood Mr. Scott was to come to town in the course of a week, so that I should not be compelled to take my final leave of him at his own seat. I quitted, however, with not a little reluctance, the immediate scene of so much pleasure-and the land of so many noble recollections. The morning, too, on which I departed, was cold and misty; the vapours seemed unwilling to melt about the bill-tops; and I forded the darkened waters of the Tweed in assuredly a very pensive mood. Muffled in my cloak above the ears, I witnessed rather than directed the motions of the shandrydan, and arrived in Auld Reekie, after a ride of more than thirty miles, almost without having escaped, for a single second, from the same cloud of reverie in which I had begun the journey.

The character of the eminent man whom I had been seeing, and the influence which his writings have produced upon his country, were, as might be supposed, the main ingredients of all my meditation. After having conversed with Mr. Scott, and so become familiar with the features of his countenance, and the tones of his voice, it seemed to me as if I had been furnished with a new key to the whole purpose of his intellectual labours, and was, for the first time, in a situation to look at the life and genius of the man with an eye of knowledge. It is wonderful bow the mere seeing of such a person gives concentration, and compactness, and distinctness to one's ideas on all subjects connected with him: I speak for myself to my mind, one of the best commentaries upon the meaning of any author, is a good image of his face and, of course, the reality is far more precious than any image can be.

You have often told me that Walter Scott has been excelled by several other poets of his time, in regularity and beauty of composition; and so far I have agreed, and do still agree with you. But I think there can be no doubt, that far more than any other poet, or any other author of his time, he is entitled to claim credit for the extent and importance of the class of ideas to which he has drawn the public attention; and if it be so, what small matters all his deficiencies or irregularities are, when put in the balance against such praise as this. At a time when the literature of Scotland-and of England too-was becoming every day more and more destitute of command over every thing but the mere

speculative understanding of men-this great genius seems to have been raised up to counteract, in the wisest and best of all ways, this unfortunate tendency of his age, by re-awakening the sympathies of his countrymen for the more energetic characters and passions of their forefathers. In so doing he employed, indeed, with the skill and power of a true master, and a true philosopher, what constitutes the only effectual means of neutralizing that barren spirit of lethargy into which the progress of civilization is in all countries so apt to lull the feelings and imaginations of mankind. The period during which most of his works were produced, was one of mighty struggles and commotions throughout all Europe, and the experience of that eventful period is sufficient to prove, that the greatest political anxieties, and the most important international struggles, can exert little awakening influence upon the character and genius of a people, if the private life of its citizens at home remains limited and monotonous, and confines their personal experience and the range of their thoughts. The rational matter-of-fact way in which all great public concerns are now-a-days carried forward, is sufficient to throw a damp upon the most stirring imagination. Wars are begun and concluded more in reliance upon the strength of money, than on the strength of minds and of men-votes, and supplies, and estimates, and regular business-like despatches, and daily papers, take away among them the greater part of that magnificent indistinctness, through which, in former times, the great games of warfare and statesmanship used alike to be regarded by those whose interests were at stake. Very little room is left for enthusiasm, when people are perpetually perplexed in their contemplations of great actions and great men, by the congratulating pettinesses of the well-disposed on one side, and the carping meannesses of the envious, and the malevolent, and the little minded, on the other. The circle within which men's thoughts move, becomes every day a narrower one--and they learn to travel to all their conclusions, not over the free and generous ranges of principle and feeling, but along the plain, hard, dusty highway of calculation. Now, a poet like Walter Scott, by enquiring into and representing the modes of life in earlier times, employs the imagination of his countrymen, as a means of making them go through the personal experience of their ancestry, and of making them acquainted with the various courses of thought and emotion, by which their forefathers

had their genius and characters drawn out-things to which, by the mechanical arrangements of modern life and society, we have been rendered too much strangers. Other poets, such as Byron, have attempted an analogous operation, by carrying us into foreign countries, where society is still comparatively young-but their method is by no means so happy or so complete as Scott's, because the people among whom they seek to interest us, have national characters totally different from our own--whereas those whose minds he exhibits as a stimulus to ours, are felt at once to be great kindred originals, of which our every-day experience shows us copies, faint indeed, but capable of being worked into stronger resemblance. If other poets should afterwards seek and collect their materials from the same field, they may perhaps be able to produce more finished compositions, but the honour of being the Patriarch of the National Poetry of Scotland, must always remain in the possession of Walter Scott. Nay, whatever direction the genius of his countrymen may take in future years, the benefit of his writings must ever be experienced in the great resuscitation of slumbering elements, which they have produced in the national mind. Perhaps the two earliest of his poems, the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, are the most valuable, because they are the most impregnated with the peculiar spirit of Scottish antiquity. In his subsequent poems, he made too much use of the common materials and machinery employed in the popular novels of that day, and descended so far as to hinge too much of their interest upon the common resources of an artfully constructed fable. In like manner, in those prose Tales--which I no more doubt to be his than the poems he has published with his name--in that delightful series of works, which have proved their author to be the nearest kinsman the creative intellect of Shakspeare has ever had the best are those, the interest of which is most directly and historically national-Waverly and Old Mortality. The whole will go down together, so long as any national character survives in Scotland--and themselves will, I nothing question, prolong the existence of national character there more effectually, than any other stimulus its waning strength is ever likely to meet with. But I think the two I have mentioned, will always be considered as the brightest jewels in this ample crown of unquenched and unquenchable radiance. What Shakspeare has done for the