sexes, which answers the purposes of propagation; and that more general society which we have with men and with animals, and which we may in some sort be said to have with the inanimate world. The object of the mixed passion, which we call love, is the beauty of the ser. Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty. I call beauty (Mr. Burke then adds,) a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals, give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, (and there are many that do so) they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons: we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary. This very just and natural distinction between the mixed passion of love which relates to the sex, and that perfectly unmixed love and tenderness which is universally the effect of beauty, must be con

stantly kept in the reader's mind, when he is considering this part of Mr. Burke's system; according to which, he applies the name of beauty to such qualities as induce in us a sense of tenderness and affection, or some other passion the most nearly resembling these.

Mr. Burke afterwards takes a review of the opinions that have been entertained of Beauty, and points out the impropriety of applying that term to virtue, or any of the severer, or sublimer qualities of the mind; and also shews that it does not consist in proportion, in perfection, or in fitness, or utility: he then examines in what it really consists, and what are its qualities: Of these qualities, I shall merely give the enumeration, and shall do what will be most satisfactory, by copying Mr. Burke's own comparison of them with the qualities of the sublime. " Sublime objects are vast in their dimensions; beautiful ones comparatively small : beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent: beauty should shun the right line, yet devi

ate from it insensibly: the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it devjates, makes a strong deviation: beauty, should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive."

This is the skeleton of Mr. Burke's system of the sublime and beautiful, and of the distinction between the two characters. As far as I have been able to observe, his principles of the sublime are more generally admitted than those of the beautiful; which, if true, may be easily accounted for: we have been used to consider the terrible as a principal source of the sublime in poetry, and therefore were prepared to have that principle extended to the whole compass of visible objects, and to have it founded on the great basis of self-preservation: but with respect to the beautiful, we had not the same preparation; and, as we have been accustomed to apply the term in a very vague and licentious manner, his attempt to restrain the sense within more exact and narrow

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bounds, has not, I imagine, been so ably received. If such were the case in this country, his ideas of the beautiful were less likely to be adopted in France, as the word beau, from its being so particularly opposed to ioli, almost always, I believe, indicates, that the object is comparatively large; whereas it is one part of Mr. Burke's system, that beautiful objects are comparatively small. Some of his other qualities of beauty have been objected to by his own countrymen; and altogether, as I conceive, his idea of beauty has been thought too confined. Now, as I have introduced a third distinct character, that of the Picturesque, I am more interested than Mr. Burke himself could be, to shew that his idea of the beautiful is not too limited; for, when three separate characters are to be distinguished from each other, each of them must of course be kept within stricter bounds.

In order to examine how far the idea of beauty may be limited, the first enquiry will be, whether in those times when beauty of form was most particularly attended to,

we can trace any idea of the beautiful as separate from all other characters. I think it clearly appears, that, although beauty of the highest kind was attributed to all the superior Goddesses, and that the ancient artists endeavoured to express it in their representations of them, yet the beauty of Venus, if not more perfect, was at least without the smallest tinge of any other character; whereas Juno, Pallas, Diana, and the other Goddesses had a mixture of awful majesty, of the severity of wisdom, of warlike valour, or of rigid chastity. These, indeed, were additions to beauty, but one may properly say, that in this case, additio probat minorem: and what particularly strengthens Mr. Burke's system is, that the effects which all such additions produce, are opposite to those of beauty. The effect of beauty, as Mr. Burke has so well pointed out, whether in the human species, in animals, or even in inanimate objects, is love, or some passion the most nearly resembling it: now, the effect of majesty or severity, even when allied to beauty, is awe a sensation very

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