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It may be remembered, that somewhat more than two years ago, Mr Willmott's Journal of Summer-time in the Country was noticed in these pages. Those who, through that or any other introduction, have since become acquainted with that exquisite little volume, will be glad to meet the author again, in the not less charming work which he has recently put forth, on the Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature.[4] The theme itself must be naturally attractive to all book-loving people; and we are prepared to say, that it is treated with felicity and discrimination. We do not aver that we always concur in the writer's judgments, or hold precisely his views of criticism; but we are, upon the whole, very decidedly impressed with the general force and truth of his Discourse, with the gracefulness of his allusions and illustrations, his elegant and pointed style, and the bland and genial temper in which he writes. The work consists of a series of short chapters on books, authors, the circumstances in which they wrote, the moods in which they should be read to be appreciated, the nature and specific qualities of taste, poetry, fiction, the drama, history, and philosophy. The author's turn of mind is chiefly retrospective: he writes more in the spirit of the last age than of the present. Indeed, he seems too much inclined to ignore the value of our later literature; almost the only modern authors whom he quotes are Hallam, Charles Lamb, and Southey; and it is evident, both from the style and matter of the work, that the range of his reading has been most extensive in what he terms the 'classical criticism and biography of the eighteenth century.' This, however, we note only in passing, and not at all in the way of condemnation; further than as it may indicate the limitations to be expected in his tone of thought and sentiment.

Mr Willmott, indeed, speaks disparagingly of some of the severer studies—especially of logic and mathematics; declaring that they 'can only be useful to a full mind,' and that, 'if they find it empty, they leave it in the same state.' Of course, he may be allowed to have his opinion on such a matter; but we presume it will not be very generally adopted. We agree with him that, 'in moral impression they are powerless;' yet we are bound to bear in mind that their aim is not a moral one; and we, furthermore, believe that, within their own scope and province, they may at least be serviceable in training and developing the understanding. Not to dwell longer on this little eccentricity of opinion, which is simply one of idiosyncrasy, let us follow the author into some of the more congenial sections of his dissertation. The following passage, on 'The three essential qualities of an author,' seems not unsuitable for quotation:—

'Sir Philip Sidney said, that the most flying wits must have three wings—art, meditation, exercise. Genius is in the instinct of flight. A boy came to Mozart, wishing to compose something, and inquiring the way to begin. Mozart told him to wait. "You composed much earlier?" "But asked nothing about it," replied the musician. Cowper expressed the same sentiment to a friend: "Nature gives men a bias to their respective pursuits, and that strong propensity, I suppose, is what we mean by genius." M. Angelo is hindered in his childish studies of art; Raffaelle grows up with pencil and colours for playthings: one neglects school to copy drawings, which he dared not bring home; the father of the other takes a journey to find his son a worthier teacher. M. Angelo forces his way; Raffaelle is guided into it. But each looks for it with longing eyes. In some way or other, the man is tracked in the little footsteps of the child. Dryden marks the three steps of progress:—

'Dryden was an example of his own theory. He read Polybius, with a notion of his historic exactness, before he was ten years old. Witnesses rise over the whole field of learning. Pope, at twelve, feasted his eyes in the picture-galleries of Spenser. Murillo filled the margin of his school-books with drawings. Le Brun, in the beginning of childhood, drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the house. The young Ariosto quietly watched the fierce gestures of his father, forgetting his displeasure in the joy of copying from life, into a comedy he was writing, the manner and speech of an old man enraged with his son.

'Cowley, in the history of his own mind, shews the influence of boyish fancies upon later life. He compares them to letters cut in the bark of a young tree, which grow and widen with it. We are not surprised to hear from a school-fellow of the Chancellor Somers, that he was a weakly boy, who always had a book in his hand, and never looked up at the play of his companions; to learn from his affectionate biographer, that Hammond at Eton sought opportunities of stealing away to say his prayers; to read that Tournefort forsook his college class, that he might search for plants in the neighbouring fields; or that Smeaton, in petticoats, was discovered on the top of his father's barn, in the act of fixing the model of a windmill which he had constructed. These early traits of character are such as we expect to find in the cultivated lawyer, who turned the eyes of his age upon Milton; in the Christian, whose life was one varied strain of devout praise; in the naturalist, who enriched science by his discoveries; and in the engineer, who built the Eddystone Lighthouse.'

This accords very well with a notion of our own. We hold that men have a tendency to follow what they are by nature best qualified to succeed in; and that the fact ought to be regarded in the education of the individual. Education should include the study and trial of aptitudes, so that each may be directed to his appropriate vocation. It is true, there are sometimes such things as 'false tendencies' to be encountered; but these, as Goethe has shewn, may be readily detected, inasmuch as they are plainly 'unproductive;' that is to say, the thing aimed after does not come out as a recognisable success. False tendencies are more easily perceived in others than in ourselves—especially when ambition, interest, or vanity is involved in the consideration; and on this account the difficulty, perhaps, might not be insurmountable, if the charge of it could be committed to a really judicious educator. But to say anything further on the subject would be out of place at present; and, accordingly, we return to what is more immediately before us.

'The instinct of flight,' continues our author, 'is combined with the instinct of labour. Genius lights its own fire; but it is constantly collecting materials to keep alive the flame. When a new publication was suggested to Addison, after the completion of the Guardian, he answered: "I must now take some time, pour me dÉlasser, and lay in fuel for a future work." The strongest blaze soon goes out when a man always blows and never feeds it. Johnson declined an introduction to a popular author with the remark, that he did not desire to converse with a person who had written more than he had read.

'It is interesting to follow great authors or painters in their careful training and accomplishing of the mind. The long morning of life is spent in making the weapons and the armour which manhood and age are to polish and prove. Usher, when nearly twenty years old, formed the daring resolution of reading all the Greek and Latin fathers, and with the dawn of his thirty-ninth year he completed the task. Hammond, at Oxford, gave thirteen hours of the day to philosophy and classical literature, wrote commentaries on all, and compiled indexes for his own use.

'With these calls to industry in our ears, we are not to be deaf to the deep saying of Lord Brooke, the friend of Sidney, that some men overbuild their nature with books. The motion of our thoughts is impeded by too heavy a burden; and the mind, like the body, is strengthened more by the warmth of exercise than of clothes. When Buffon and Hogarth pronounced genius to be nothing but labour and patience, they forgot history and themselves. The instinct must be in the mind, and the fire be ready to fall. Toil alone would not have produced the Paradise Lost or the Principia. The born dwarf never grows to the middle size. Rousseau tells a story of a painter's servant, who resolved to be the rival or the conqueror of his master. He abandoned his livery to live by his pencil; but instead of the Louvre, he stopped at a sign-post. Mere learning is only a compiler, and does with the pen what the compositor does with the type: each sets up a book with the hand. Stone-masons collected the dome of St Paul's, but Wren hung it in air.'

There is, perhaps, nothing very profound or original in this, but it is all very sensible and pleasant. Something of novelty, however, will be observed in the extract which follows next, on 'The Influence of Air and Situation on the Thoughts.' The consideration, at anyrate, is curious, both under its physiological and metaphysical aspect.

'It has been a subject of ingenious speculation if country or weather may be said to cherish or check intellectual growth. Jeremy Collier considered that the understanding needs a kind climate for its health, and that a reader of nice observation might ascertain from the book in what latitude, season, or circumstances, it had been written. The opponents are powerful. Reynolds ridiculed the notion of thoughts shooting forth with greater vigour at the summer solstice or the equinox; Johnson called it a fantastic foppery.

'The atmospheric theory is as old as Homer. Its laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a convert. One of the prose hints for his noble fragment of a didactic poem runs thus: "It is the proper work of education and government united, to redress the faults that arise from the soil and air." Berkeley entertained the same feeling. Writing to Pope from Leghorn, and alluding to some half-formed design he had heard him mention of visiting Italy, he continues: "What might we not expect from a muse that sings so well in the bleak climate of England, if she felt the same warm sun, and breathed the same air with Virgil and Horace?"

'When Dyer attributes the faults of his Fleece to the Lincolnshire fens, he only awakes a smile. Keats wrote his Ode to a Nightingale—a poem full of the sweet south—at the foot of Highgate Hill. But we have the remark of Dryden—probably the result of his own experience—that a cloudy day is able to alter the thoughts of a man; and, generally, the air we breathe, and the objects we see, have a secret influence upon our imagination. Burke was certain that Milton composed Il Penseroso in the long, resounding aisle of a mouldering cloister, or ivied abbey. He beheld its solemn gloom in the verse. The fine nerves of the mind are braced, and the strings of the harp are tuned, by different kinds of temperature. "I think," Warburton remarked to Hurd, "you have often heard me say, that my delicious season is the autumn—the season which gives most life and vigour to my intellectual faculties. The light mists, or, as Milton calls them, the steams that rise from the fields in one of these mornings, give the same relief to the views that the blue of the plum gives to the appetite."

'Mozart composed, whenever he had the opportunity, in the soft air of fine weather. His Don Giovanni and the Requiem were written in a bowling-green and a garden. Chatterton found a full moon favourable to poetic invention, and he often sat up all night to enjoy its solemn shining. Winter-time was most agreeable to Crabbe. He delighted in a heavy fall of snow; and it was during a severe storm which blocked him within doors, that he portrayed the strange miseries of Sir Eustace Grey.'

There may be something in this supposed influence of temperature and seasons; but there certainly is no general law observable in the matter. Shakspeare asks—

He might have been answered by Moore, who shut himself up in the wintry wilds of Derbyshire to write Lalla Rookh—a poem breathing of the perfumes, and glowing in the sunlight of the golden East; and by Scott, who, in Jermyn Street, St James's, with miles of brick houses round him, produced his famous introductions to Marmion, some of which may rank with the finest descriptions of natural scenery in the language. But the way in which people are influenced seems utterly capricious. We know a writer who is always unfavourably affected by a dull, still atmosphere, and whose faculties are as invariably exhilarated by a high wind. Cloudy weather does not influence him disagreeably if it be stormy, but calm, leaden November glooms oppress him with a feeling bordering upon stupor. These are altogether unproductive days with him. If authors, however, are subject in their moods to atmospheric and other circumstantial influences, it may be expected that readers also are to some extent possessed of a like tendency. Mr Willmott has, accordingly, a suitable suggestive word or two to guide them in their reading. He says:—

'A classification of authors to suit all hours and weathers might be amusing. Ariosto spans a wet afternoon like a rainbow. North winds and sleet agree with Junius. The visionary tombs of Dante glimmer into awfuller perspective by moonlight. Crabbe is never so pleasing as on the hot shingle, when we look up from his verses at the sleepy sea, and count the

'Some books come in with lamps and curtains, and fresh logs. An evening in late autumn, when there is no moon, and the boughs toss like foam raking its way back down a pebbly shore, is just the time for Undine. A voyage is read with deepest interest in winter, while the hail dashes against the window. Southey speaks of this delight—

'The sobs of the storm are musical chimes for a ghost-story, or one of those fearful tales with which the blind fiddler in Redgauntlet made "the auld carlines shake on the settle, and the bits of bairns skirl on their minnies out frae their beds."

'Shakspeare is always most welcome at the chimney-corner; so is Goldsmith: who does not wish Dr Primrose to call in the evening, and Olivia to preside at the urn? Elia affirms, that there is no such thing as reading or writing, but by a candle; he is confident that Milton composed the morning hymn of Eden with a clear fire burning in the room; and in Taylor's gorgeous description of sunrise, he found the smell of the lamp quite overpowering.... But Elia,' he says further on, 'carried his fireside theory too far. Some people have tried "the affectation of a book at noonday in gardens and sultry arbours," without finding their task of love to be unlearnt. Indeed, many books belong to sunshine, and should be read out of doors. Clover, violets, and hedge-roses, breathe from their leaves; they are most lovable in cool lanes, along field-paths, or upon stiles overhung by hawthorn; while the black-bird pipes, and the nightingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse.

'The sensation is heightened when an author is read amid the scenery or the manners which he describes—as Barrow studied the sermons of Chrysostom in his own see of Constantinople. What daisies sprinkle the walks of Cowper, if we take his Task for a companion through the lanes of Weston! Under the thick hedges of Horton, darkening either bank of the field in the September moonlight, Il Penseroso is still more pensive. And whoever would feel at his heart the deep pathos of Collins's lamentation for Thomson, must murmur it to himself, as he glides upon the stealing wave, by the breezy lawns and elms of Richmond.'

Our author has some judicious remarks on 'Criticism, its Curiosities and Researches,' and is himself a critic of refined and delicate appreciation. We certainly do not agree with him in thinking that the literature of the last century is superior to that of the present; but we can nevertheless admit that many of his favourite writers are deserving of a higher and more reverent regard than is now generally awarded them. We would quarrel with no man about his preferences; still, we cannot hold Mr Willmott justified in such sweeping condemnation of our current literature as he appears disposed to pass upon it. It would seem, indeed, that in his disgust at 'the corrupted streams of popular entertainment,' he has not cared to make himself acquainted with the best of our modern writers. Of these he seems—if we may judge from his total oversight of them—to have hardly a knowledge of the names. 'He lives,' as he admits, 'among the society of an elder age.' Here, however, he numbers 'tasteful learning with the chiefest blessings of his home.' If he had lived in the last century, he would probably have gone back for his idols to an earlier one; and yet his remarks on taste and criticism are of a catholic nature, although his just application of their canons have this chronological boundary. We have no room, however, for his disquisition on these elegant subjects; neither can we follow our accomplished clergyman into his disquisitions on fiction, history, biography, philosophy, and its pleasures, nor the 'domestic interiors' of taste and learning. We had intended to quote some fine sentences on the consolations of poetry, but find we have not room for them. The reader will do well to get the book, and read them there. It is a work altogether well worth reading. Nay, it will bear reading many times, and even become pleasanter as one's acquaintance with it increases. Indeed, it is not at all the kind of book to be run through rapidly, and so disposed of; the thought and observation in it are closely packed and methodised; and if you wish to derive any benefit, or even pleasure from the perusal, you will need to read deliberately. We should say the author thoroughly enjoyed his work while he was engaged in it; but the workmanship exhibits everywhere the greatest care and patience. The same habit of mind employed in writing it will be required in the reading. We may describe the book as being a graceful, suggestive review of literature, considered with regard to its enjoyments. Refined, scholarly, tolerant, and judicious in all his tastes and sympathies, the author's influence upon other minds cannot be otherwise than wholesome, elevating, and benignant.