is not only equal, but superior to a Virgil, or a Livy, or a Thucydides, or a Homer!” and that painting can reform our manners, increase our opulence, honour, and power.  Denina, in his “Revolutions of Literature,” tells us that to excel in historical composition requires more ability than is exercised by the excelling masters of any other art; because it requires not only the same erudition, genius, imagination, and taste, necessary for a poet, a painter, or a philosopher, but the historian must also have some peculiar qualifications; this served as a prelude to his own history.[A] Helvetius, an enthusiast in the fine arts and polite literature, has composed a poem on Happiness; and imagines that it consists in an exclusive love of the cultivation of letters and the arts.  All this shows that the more intensely we attach ourselves to an individual object, the more numerous and the more perfect are our sensations; if we yield to the distracting variety of opposite pursuits with an equal passion, our soul is placed amid a continual shock of ideas, and happiness is lost by mistakes.

[Footnote A:  One of the most amusing modern instances occurs in the Preface to the late Peter Buchan’s annotated edition of “Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland” (2 vols. 8vo, Edin. 1828), in which he declares—­“no one has yet conceived, nor has it entered the mind of man, what patience, perseverance, and general knowledge are necessary for an editor of a Collection of Ancient Ballads.”—­ED.]

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ON NOVELTY IN LITERATURE.

“All is said,” exclaims the lively La Bruyere; but at the same moment, by his own admirable Reflections, confutes the dreary system he would establish.  An opinion of the exhausted state of literature has been a popular prejudice of remote existence; and an unhappy idea of a wise ancient, who, even in his day, lamented that “of books there is no end,” has been transcribed in many books.  He who has critically examined any branch of literature has discovered how little of original invention is to be found even in the most excellent works.  To add a little to his predecessors satisfies the ambition of the first geniuses.  The popular notion of literary novelty is an idea more fanciful than exact.  Many are yet to learn that our admired originals are not such as they mistake them to be; that the plans of the most original performances have been borrowed; and that the thoughts of the most admired compositions are not wonderful discoveries, but only truths, which the ingenuity of the author, by arranging the intermediate and accessary ideas, has unfolded from that confused sentiment, which those experience who are not accustomed to think with depth, or to discriminate with accuracy.  This Novelty in Literature is, as Pope defines it,

  What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.

Novelty, in its rigid acceptation, will not be found in any judicious production.