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"the bitter apples of Sodom;" these are all ideas fuitable to a fublime description. Nor is this paffage of Virgil without fublimity, where the stench of the vapour in Albunea confpires fo happily with the facred horrour and gloominess of that prophetick foreft;

At rex folicitus monftris oracula Fauni
Fatidici genitoris adit, lucosque fub alta
Confulit Albunea, nemorum quæ maxima facro
Fonte fonat; fævamque exhalat opaca Mephitim.

In the fixth book, and in a very fublime defcription, the poisonous exhalation of Acheron is not forgot, nor does it at all disagree with the other images amongst which it is introduced:

Spelunca alta fuit, vastoque immanis hiatu
Scrupea, tuta lacu nigro, nemorumque tenebris,
Quam fuper haud ullæ poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis, talis sese halitus atris
Faucibus effundens fupera ad convexa ferebat.

I have added these examples, because some friends, for whose judgment I have great deference, were of opinion, that if the fentiment stood nakedly by ivself, it would be subject, at first view, to burlesque and ridicule; but this I imagine would principally arife from confidering the bitterness and stench in company with mean and contemp tible ideas, with which it must be owned they are often united; such an union degrades the fublime in all other instances as well as in those. But it is one of the tests by which the fublimity of an image is to be tried, not whether it becomes mean when associated with mean ideas; but whether, when united with images of an allowed grandeur, the whole composition is supported with dignity. Things which are terrible are always great; but when things possess disagreeable qualities, or such as have indeed some degree of danger, but of a danger easily overcome, they are merely odious, as toads and spiders.

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OF Feeling, little more can be faid than that the idea of bodily pain, in all the modes and degrees of labour, pain, anguish, torment, is productive of the fublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it. I need not give here any fresh instances, as those given in the former sections abundantly illustrate a remark, that in reality wants only an attention to nature, to be made by every body.

Having Having thus run through the causes of the fublime with reference to all the fenfes, my first obfervation (fect. 7.) will be found very nearly true; that the fublime is an idea belonging to self-preservation; that it is therefore one of the most affecting we have; that its strongest emotion is an emotion of distress; and that no *pleasure from a positive cause belongs to it. Numberless examples, befides those mentioned, might be brought in support of these truths, and many perhaps ufeful confequences drawn from them

Sed fugit interea, fugit irrevocabile tempus,
Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.

* Vide Part I. fect. 6.

THE END OF THE SECOND PART

A PHILO.

::

A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

INTO THE

ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS

OF THE

SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL.

PART III.

SECTION I.

OF BEAUTY.

T is my design to consider beauty as distin

of the inquiry, to examine how far it is confiftent with it. But previous to this, we must take a short review of the opinions already entertained of this quality; which I think are hardly to be reduced to any fixed principles; because men are used to talk of beauty in a figurative manner, that is to say, in a manner extremely uncertain, and indeterminate. By beauty I mean that quality, or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause

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