lesser collateral causes working together, aiding and strengthening each other meanwhile, ere decided results are produced. This is perceptible in small matters, as well as in matters of importance. Something more than a mere partiality for landscape painting has been at work; people had grown tired of mere vapid, conventional repetitions, they felt the want of something more positive, more real; the head called for more of truth, the heart for more of life. And so, writers began to look out of the window more frequently; when writing a pastoral they turned away from the little porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses, standing in high-heeled shoes and powdered wigs upon every mantel-piece, and they fixed their eyes upon the real living Roger and Dolly in the hay-field. Then they came to see that it would do just as well, nay, far better, to seat Roger and Dolly under a hawthorn, or an oak of merry England, than to paint them beneath a laurel, or an ilex of Greece or Rome; in short, they learned at length to look at nature by the light of the sun, and not by the glimmerings of the poet's lamp. And a great step this was, not only in art, but in moral and intellectual progress.[1] One of the first among the later English poets, who led
- ↑ Note.—This onward course in truthful description should not stop short at inanimate nature. There is a still further progress which remains to be effected; the same care, the same attention, the same scruples should, most assuredly, be shown by the conscientious mind, in writing of our fellow-creatures. If we seek to give a correct picture of a landscape, a tree, a building, how much more anxious should we be never willingly to give a distorted or perverted view of any fellow-man, or class of men; of any fact bearing upon the welfare of our fellow-creatures, or of any class of facts with the same bearing! We claim, in this age, to be more especially in quest of truths—how, then, shall we ever find them, if we are all busy in throwing obstacles in each other's way? Even in fiction, nay, in satire, in caricature, there are just proportions which it is criminal wholly to pervert. In such cases, political writers are often avowedly without shame; and, alas! how often do Christian writers conform, in this way, to the world about them! Perhaps there is no other commandment of Holy Scripture more boldly trampled on, in spirit at least, at the present day, than the ninth, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” It is to be feared that the present age is more especially a slanderous one; slanderous not only upon individuals, but upon classes. Where shall we find the political party, the school of philosophy, the religious sect or party, wholly pure from this poison? These are among the facts which teach our race a lesson of perpetual humility.
