any anomaly of the sort could surprise us, we might well be surprised. With the exception of the College at Putney, confined to a few aspirants to the honorary degree of C. E. for practically the profession is not limited to such the scientific education of the young mechanist must be self-acquired, or, at best, irregularly obtained in the classes voluntarily formed among the members of literary institutions. Yet every day the necessity for practical and technical instruction is becoming more manifest. We see it marked as strongly in the success of the few who succeed, as in the failure of the many efforts of ignorant and mistaken ingenuity.

Blind intuition has now little hope of success in the work of invention. Mere chance has still less it never, indeed, had so much as popular reputation gave it credit for. Chance might have set in motion the chandelier suspended in the Pisa cathedral; but if chance also suggested to Galileo the laws of the pendulum, it must have belonged to that multitudinous order of casualties, by which ideas are ordinarily propagated in fit and fertile minds. Two generations ago Mr. Watt observed, that he had known many workmen who had suggested some improved adaptation of mechanism, but never one who invented an instrument, involving a principle, like that of his centrifugal 'governor.' Machines that do not involve a principle are now grown so rare, that the range of invention is almost annihilated for the mere workman. On the other hand, we observe how singularly, when

the principle is once fairly studied, mechanical inventions are simultaneously made in many places at once. The honors of the electrotype processes, of the Daguerreotype, the electric telegraph, the screw-propeller, and a host besides, are disputed by a hundred rival claimants. Chance, we thus perceive, did not produce those discoveries; and from the same facts we obtain a gratifying assurance that it could not have prevented their production. Well directed education will make the creations of the human mind more abundant, as printing has already secured their indestructibility.

Of the legal aids or hindrances to invention, it is not now our purpose to speak, although the anomalies of the laws in relation to the subject are confessedly flagrant. One suggestion for improvement we have already referred to. It is that every petitioner for a patent should deposit in a gallery or museum, accessible to the public, a working model, drawing, or specimen of his invention, whether in mechanism, art, or manufacture. Museums of this description would prove of infinite assistance towards that scinentific educa tion in which we are now so lamentably deficient. The public would then obtain some countervailing advantage from a system, of which it is hard to say whether it is more injurious by the monopoly that it confers or the privileges it denies; by the difficulties it imposes on an inventor who seeks to profit by his discovery, or by the hinderances which it puts in the way of his successors, who have devised improvements on the first invention.

On Thursday a valuable collection of chalk drawings, by the late unfortunate Haydon, was disposed of by public auction at the rooms of the Messrs. Robins, Covent Garden. The collection consisted chiefly of sketches from the ancient masters, unfinished sketches of heads of his Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, the late Mr. O'Connell, Lord J. Russell, and other eminent individuals. It also comprised the celebrated "sleeping head," exhibited at the British Gallery in 1822, which is considered by the cognoscenti to be one of the most exquisite specimens of native art; an unfinished gallery painting of Uriel and Satan, upon which the artist was engaged until a short time previous to his decease; a painting of Napoleon and hat for the studio of Sir Robert Peel; a finely sculp

tured marble bust of General Washington, and a large number of miscellaneous sketches. Several virtuosi were present. The bidding was tolerably brisk, and, considering that the drawings were in a very crude and imperfect state, the prices they realized were extremely good. Five finished heads of Lord Melbourne, Lord Stanley, Earl Grey, Lord Althorp, and Sir F. Buxton, were sold for 21. 7s. 6d. A head of Lord John Russell brought 21. 10s.; and the "sleeping head" was sold for 5l. 58. Several anatomical studies, presented by Sir David Wilkie to Haydon, were sold at respectable prices, but many of the sketches realized very small sums. The whole of the proceeds will be devoted to the relief of the family of the lamented artist.

THE removal of a young man of high per- | formance and still higher promise is in all circumstances melancholy. It is more so, if with the youth has expired either a new vein of poetry or a new view of truth; and it is scarcely less so when the youth has been unconsciously the type of a large class of cultivated and earnest minds, and when his partial successes, baffled endeavors-his admitted struggles, and his premature fate

have been in some measure vicarious.

was,

These three short and simple sentences appear to us to include, positively and negatively, the essence of the late John Sterling, and shall form the leading heads in our after remarks on his genius and character. He in the judgment of all who knew or had carefully read him, a person of very distinguished abilities, and of still more singular promise. He did not, in our view of him, exhibit indications of original insight or of creative genius. But he has, from his peculiar circumstances, from his speculative and practical history, from his exquisitely-tuned and swiftly-responsive symphonies with his age and its progressive minds, acquired a double portion of interest and importance; his experience seems that of multitudes, and in that final look of disappointed yet submissive inquiry which he casts up to heaven, he is but the foremost in a long, fluctuating, and motley file.

The external evidences of his powers and acquirements are numerous and irresistible. In his boyhood he discovered striking tokens of a mind keen, sensitive, and turned in the direction of those high speculations from which his eye, till death, was never entirely diverted. While barely eight, "he distinctly

remembered having speculated on points of philosophy, and especially on the idea of duty, which presented itself to him in this way-"If I could save my papa and mamma from being killed, I know I should at once do it. Now, why? To be killed would be very painful, and yet I should give my own consent to being killed." The solution presented itself as "a dim, awe-stricken feeling of unknown obligation." When about nine," he was much struck by his master's telling him that the word sincere was derived from the practice of filling up flaws in furniture with wax, whence sine cera came to mean pure, not vamped up." This explanation, he said, gave him great pleasure, and abode in his memory, as having first shown him that there is a reason in words as well as in other things. When a boy, he read through the whole "Edinburgh Review," of which his biographer says, "a diet than which hardly any could yield less wholesome food for a young mind, and which could scarcely fail to puff it up with the wind of self-conceit." We doubt the validity of this dictum. We conceive that, to a fresh elastic mind, the crossing of such varied territories of thought, the coming in contact with so many vigorous minds, the acquiring such stores of miscellaneous information, the mere reading of such a mass of masculine English, as the perusal of the entire "Edinburgh Review" implies, must have been beneficial, and tended to awaken curiosity, to kindle ambition, to stifle mannerism of style, and, as the likely result of the many severe criticisms in which the book abounds, to allay instead of fanning the feeling of self-conceit. Who but commends the industry of the boy who reads all the English

essayists a course of reading certainly much more dissipating; or the youth who reads all Bayle's "Dictionary"-a course of reading much more dangerous than the " Edinburgh Review?" Let the boy read at his pleasure the youth will study, and the man think and

act.

At Cambridge, Sterling did not greatly distinguish himself, nor did he bear any violent affection to his alma mater. For mathematics he had little taste; the classics he rather relished than thoroughly knew. He early commenced the study of philosophy, deeming it at once the key to a scientific theology and to a lofty literature, although latterly he all but left the cold and perilous crags of speculation for the flowery meadows of poetry and æsthetics. At the feet of Coleridge no one ever sat with a feeling of more entire and childlike submission; the house at Highgate was to him the shrine of a god, and his biographer regrets that he "did not preserve an account of Coleridge's conversations, for he was capable of representing their depth, their ever-varying hues, their sparkling lights, their oceanic ebb and flow." He began soon to empty out his teeming mind, in the forms both of verse and prose. In the course of his short life we find him connected, more or less intimately, with the following periodicals: the Athenæum," "Blackwood's Magazine," the "Quarterly," and the London and Westminster" Reviews." The 'Athenæum," when he and Maurice wrote in it, was not the stale summary of new books and gossip which it has since become; it had still some life, genius, and principle; and his "Shades of the Dead" are valuable as beautiful versions of Coleridge's spoken "Hero-worship." At a peculiarly dull period in the history of "Maga" he appeared, amid a flourish of trumpets, as a tributor," and did succeed in shooting a little new blood into her withered veins. In the "Quarterly" he wrote a paper on Tennyson, which was attributed at the time to Henry Nelson Coleridge. Differing as he did in many material points from the new school of Radicals who conducted the "Westminster," he seemed more at home in their company than in that of the knights of the Noctes; and his contributions to their journal are all characteristic. These articles have been reprinted by Dr. Hare, and, along with the poems, his tragedy of "Stafford," a few letters, and other remains, constitute all his written claims to consideration.

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He has certainly in them raised no very great or compact basis for future fame; but

we are entitled to adduce, in addition, the testimony of his friends, who all speak with rapture of the possibilities of his mind-of his talent as a debater-and of his ready, vivid, and brilliant talk. In him alone Thomas Carlyle met his conversational match; he alone ventured to face him in single combat, and nothing like their renconters seems to have been witnessed since those of Johnson and Burke. Even in his "Remains" we may find faint yet distinct indications of all the principal features of his intellectual character. These, we think, may be classed under the three general characteristics of sympathy, sincerity, and culture. We do not mean that these sum up the whole of his idiosyncrasy, but simply that they are the qualities which have struck us most forcibly in the perusal of his works. He had, besides, as a writer, a fine inventiveness, a rich and varied stock of figures, a power of arresting and fixing in permanent shapes the thinnest gossamer abstractions, and the command of a diction remarkable more for its copiousness, flexibility, and strength, than for grace, clearness, or felicitous condensation. Perhaps his principal claim to reputation rests on his criticisms, and their power and charm lie in genial and self-forgetting sympathy. It is too customary to speak of this as a subordinate quality in a critic, as a veil over his eyes, and nearly inconsistent with the exercise of analytic sagacity. Those who talk in this manner are not so much guilty of a mistake as of a stupid blunder. Sympathy we regard as closely connected with sight. It is a medium which, like water poured into a bowl, enables you to see objects previously invisible. It, and it alone, opens a window into the breast and the brain of genius, and shows the marvellous processes which are going on within. It is not merely that the heart often sees farther than the intellect, but it is that sympathy cleanses and sharpens even the intellectual eye. Love, and you will understand. Besides, the possession of powerful sympathy with intellect and genius, implies a certain similitude of mind on the part of the sympathizer. The blind cannot sympathize with descriptions of scenery, and the lively motion and music of a mountain-stream sound like a satire to the lame who limp beside it. To feel with, you must always find yourself in, the subject or the person. Adam Smith doubtless was wrong when he explained every moral phenomenon by sympathy; it were a more probable paradox to maintain that a man's intellectual power entirely depends upon the depth, width, and warmth of his sympathies,

and that Shakspeare was the greatest of men because he was the widest of sympathizers. Waiving, at this stage of our paper, such speculations, we claim a high place for Sterling, as possessed of catholic and clear-headed sympathy. Merely to copy the names of a few of the characters whom he has analyzed with justice, and praised with generosity, is enough to prove this. He has painted Alexander the Great and Wycliffe, Joan of Arc and Gustavus Adolphus, Milton and Burns, Columbus and Coleridge, Simonides and Carlyle, Napier and Tennyson. We find him, too, on friendly terms at once with "Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Westminster Review;" writing in the " Quarterly," and calling Shelley a "generous, heroic being;" and in his "Tales" and "Apologues" imitating the imaginative peculiarities, now of the Gothic, now of the Grecian, and now of the German school. We love this spirit much, not merely as proclaiming a warm heart, but as evincing a wide, keen, and open intellect. We contrast it favorably with a portion of the very class to whom Sterling belonged, whose fastidiousness is fast becoming frantic, who are loathing literature itself, although it is by it alone that themselves have risen, and whose hasty, splenetic, and contradictory judgments tend to exert a damping and discouraging influence upon youthful aspirants, who will ask, if such authorities tell us that nothing has yet been done, how can we expect ever to do anything? Sterling, on the contrary, loved literature for its own sake, and had a true appreciation of its infinite worth and beauty. He was not like Byron, and one or two others we might name, who looked upon literature partly as a means for gratifying an ambition to which other avenues were closed, and partly as an outlet for the waste energy and superfluous fury of their natures, when their passions had not entirely exhausted them, and who, upon the first disappointment and chagrin, were ready to rush into another field; nor did he resemble a class who have mistaken their profession, and expended powers which might have led them to the highest distinction, in action, in travelling, parliament, or arms, on gaining a dubious literary success, which is despised by themselves; nor did he rank with the men whose love to literature is confined to an appreciation of those who resemble, or who follow their peculiar style. His circumstances saved him from the miserable condition of a hack author, and from all the heart-burnings, jealousies, and disgusts which degrade the noble pursuit of literature in his eyes, and

turn the beautiful moon into the clouded lantern of a low, lurid, precarious life. Sterling, in his wide and trembling sympathies with literary excellence, and in his devoted enthusiasm for the varied expressions of the beautiful, as well as in the hectic heat and eagerness of his temperament, bore a striking likeness to Shelley, although possessing a healthier, happier, and better balanced nature.

We

While freely conceding him such qualities, we protest against some of his critical commissions as well as omissions. We are astonished at his silence in reference to John Foster, whose sturdy genius ought to have been known to him, and whose mind was moving more slowly and uneasily through the same process of speculative change with his own. cannot at all understand his admiration for Montaigne, who appears to have been a very slight sublimation of sensual indifference, and not more honest than the sensual-indifferent wealthy usually are. How grossly unjust he is to Rousseau and Hazlitt, when he calls them "declaimers and leaders in rhetorical falsehood!" Grant that Rousseau was personally a poor scrannel, tortuous, and broken pipe, who can deny that a power, call it his genius or his demon, discoursed at times upon him sweet and powerful music, to which nations listened because they could not refrain, and which no term like rhetoric, or even oratory, nor any inferior to poetry, touching the verge of prophecy, can at all measure? No such utterances have come from Hazlitt, but if he resembled Rousseau in occasional bursts of vanity, he was certainly, on the whole, a sincerer man he egotizes at his proper costhis absurdities seem given in on oath. For downright honesty, and for masses of plain sense and native acuteness, we are not afraid to compare and prefer many of his essays to those of the old Gascon, and, with all his faults and deficiencies, his match as a masculine and eloquent critic has yet to be made. What verbose affairs do even Jeffrey's criticisms, when collected, appear beside the lectures of Hazlitt, who often expresses the essence of an author by the scratch of his pen, and settles a literary controversy by an epithet.

Initiation into the mysteries of German philosophy and literature produced in Sterling a considerable degree of indifference toward the English classics. To Addison's essays-those cool, clear, whispering leaves of summer, so native and so refreshing-he never alludes, and we cannot conceive him, like Burke, hushing himself to his last slum

ber, by hearing read the papers in the "Spectator" on the immortality of the soul. And against Dr. Johnson he has committed himself in a set attack, of which we must speak more particularly. An author of celebrity maintains that no person can be a man of talent who does not admire "Dr Johnson, and that all men of eminent ability do admire him." Without pressing the application of this assertion, we do think that those who, in the present age, find in him a hero, discover both candor and penetration-candor to admit and pass by his bulky faults as a writer, and penetration to see his bulky though disguised merits as a writer and a man. For one to call him a mere "prejudiced, emphatic pedant," is simply to write down one's self an ass. For Coleridge to call him "the overrated man of his age," (how could the age avoid rating him highly, since he was, save Burke, the greatest man it had ?) is for Coleridge to prove himself a privileged person, who said whatever he chose. Sterling's charges may be classified thus: Dr Johnson's productions are "loud and swollen"-he could say nothing of poetry, and has said nothing of Shakspeare" worth listening to" he had no serene joy"-and he wanted it because he had no "capacity for the higher kinds of thought." To the proof:

1st. His language was "loud and swollen." Granted. So is a torrent, or a river in flood. So are Thomson's "Seasons," Young's "Night Thoughts," Schiller's "Robbers," Coleridge's "Hymn to Mont Blanc" and Religious Musings," Sterling's "Lycian Painter" and "Last of the Giants," all productions of genuine merit and meaning, and yet all stilted either in style or manner, or both. Johnson is often loud, but seldom boss-he can beat the drum, but he can shiver the castle-gate with his axe too. If his arm be sometimes "swollen" with indolence, it is often swollen with heavy blows aimed, and not in vain, at the heads of his enemies. His very yawn is thunder-he swings in an easy chair, which many that mock him could not move. You may laugh at the elephant picking up the pin, but not ejaculating you, brained and battered, toward the skies.

2dly. He has said nothing of Shakspeare or poetry worth listening to. What! Is his dissertation in Waller on sacred poetry, be it true or false, not worth listening to? or his panegyric on the "Paradise Lost?" or his character of the "Night Thoughts?" or his comparison between Pope and Dryden? or his picture of a poet in Rasselas ?" or his unanswered overturn of the unities in his essay

on Shakspeare? or several other portions of that " ponderous mass of futilities?" or his famous lines on Shakspeare? Mark, we are not asserting that all such passages are of the highest order of philosophical criticism, but we are asserting their intrinsic value, and their immeasurable superiority to the vague, empty, pointless, misty, and pseudo-German disquisitions which stuff many of our principal magazines and reviews in the present day. We are not prepared to sacrifice the poorest passages in the "Lives of the Poets"-nay, not even his notes on Shakspeare, (which make Fanny Kemble swear-off the stage,) for such a piece of elaborate and recondite idiocy, as recently was permitted to appear in a celebrated Scottish review, as a paper on Tennyson's "Princess," and was yet not the worst specimen of the kind of criticism referred to.

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But Sterling accuses Johnson of wanting serene joy;" an accusation, alas! too true. But, how could he have attained this, in the first place, under the pressure of that "vile body"—that huge mass of disease, bad humors, and semi-blindness, which he carried about with him, and under which he struggled and writhed like a giant below Etna? In the victim of old, yoked consciously to a putrifying carcass, we may conceive stern submission, but hardly serene joy. We can account for a man like William Cobbett, high in health, clear in eye, and with a system answering like the crystal mirror of a stream to every feature of his intellectual faculties, reproaching Johnson with gloom, but must think it a sad mistake, if not an affectation, on the part of a philosophic valetudinarian like John Sterling. Besides, as it has been said that the laws of disease are as beautiful as those of health, the intuitions of disease are as true as those of health. In none of them is the whole truth found; but even as the jaundiced view is only a partial rendering of the creation and of man, so the view of one in perfect health and strength, with a sanguine temperament, and in circumstances of signal prosperity, is equally imperfect. The one may be called a black or yellow, the other a white lie. Surely the Cockney we have elsewhere commemorated as sitting with Carlyle in a railway carriage, rubbing his hands, and saying to the grim stranger-" Successful world this, isn't it, sir ?" was as far astray as the author of Sartor glaring through the gloomy, bile-spotted splendor of the atmosphere which usually surrounds his spirit. And whether are more trustworthy, the feelings of the man standing before his fire,