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lochs, as in rivers, fish rise best when a heavy flood begins to subside gradually. But white trout, grilse, and salmon never do well if the loch falls in rapidly, as most anglers know is the case in riverfloods. Fish colour very soon in many of the island lochs, from the mossy streams which feed them. So in most of the northern rivers, from the same cause. As river-fish

seek out the deep pools before spawning-time, so the loch-salmon keep off banks, points, and shallows, getting into deeper water preparatory to choosing their spawning-beds in the river. Soon after this they creep down the streams, look out their pools, then return to the loch till it is time to take final possession. Both in lochs and rivers, fish are capital barometers. They are very sulky before rain, and won't rise till it falls. There are certain times when fish rise freely in some pool of the river, or particular point of rock in the loch, refusing the most tempting lures on the rest of the water. In these small lochs it is best to fish with a bob-fly as well as a trail. The bob often attracts fish to rise at the trail that would not otherwise rise at all. If the flies are small, or the waves high, the bob is the more necessary. With decided waves, however, fish are apt to miss the fly.

On the Dalmally fishings of the Urchy, only one small salmon had been caught during the last ten days; it was, therefore, with no piscatorial longings we left Dalmally Inn, and pursued our homeward course through the braes of Breadalbane to Glen Falloch. My keeper met us within a short distance of the gate, with tidings that a golden eagle had built on our northern hill. Having already a fine specimen in my collection, I would fain have left her to hatch in peace. True to the game, however, John expostulated, not only that we should be held responsible for every dead lamb on the hills, but that, as soon as it was known VOL. XCII.-NO. DLXII.

that I intended to spare the hatching eagle, she would be pretty sure to meet with an untimely end by some foul play. Early next day, therefore, I started with him for the eyrie in the Corbie's Rock. It was little more than an hour's climb before we found ourselves at the opposite side of the chasm, where we hoped the eagle was securely sitting. The non-appearance of her mate was rather a bad omen. John had seen him fly across the glen like lightning about a week before, as if jealous of intrusion. Still, however, we determined to act with caution. Sitting down, we took off our brogues, uncased the heavy gun, relieved ourselves of deer-glass and every other incumbrance, and then picked our way noiselessly along the cliffs, till we stood right under the eyrie. I now made a sign to John to rouse the bird. His summons grew louder and louder, but there was no rush from the nest, no heavy flap in the air. It was evident the eyrie was tenantless. We soon gained the summit of the crag, but neither eaglet nor egg was in the nest. As a shepherd who knew of the eagles had been complaining of their depredations, we suppose that he had scared them before the eggs were laid.

I have seen many an eyrie, but never so fitting a home for an eagle. It lay upon the only ledge of a perpendicular boulder, opposite to a corresponding mass of granite, and surrounded by jagged rocks and caverns, habitations of the badger, whose recent marks were visible all round. The marten-cat also used to shelter here (pity that it does not still!); and John informed me that a venerable goat from Balquhidder made this cairn his refuge from the winter storms. "He was as wild as a deer," said he, "and I wondered to see how clane and sure-footed he wad sprung from rock to rock when the terriers were for after him."

The chasm is known as the Corbie's Rock, from a pair of ravens having built there for many a year,

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and this is the first season, within memory of the shepherds, of an eagle having taken possession of the Raven's Fort. The former tenants often attempted to make their nest on the eagle's shelf, but the wind was always too strong for them and swept their fabric away. They were therefore forced to choose a more accessible and less exposed recess, while the royal bird fearlessly made its home in the blast.

Far from chagrin, my feeling was, on the contrary, pleasure, that these noble catterans still range Glen Falloch mountains, and take their share of the spoil. Although gamekeepers, both Saxon and Sassenach, may be excused for pluming themselves on their wholesale extermination, a true Celt will always take pride in the higher class of carnivora, and point to them as among the grandest ornaments of his hills. That magnificent game-birds have been lately introduced is no doubt deeply interesting to the naturalist; but somehow he associates them with the countries from whence they came, and feels inclined to regard them as exiles. The gobble of the wild turkey-cock among the remote copses and tangled coverts of Rossdhu, does away for a moment with the broad Atlantic, and transports the listener to the American backwoods. These beautiful birds, nearly the size of a Norfolk turkey, are of a rich bronze colour, shining like gold in the sun; when disturbed they run into thick wood, or fly for refuge into trees.

It is to Lord Breadalbane that

Scotland owes the recovery of the Tetruoan king. The famous cock of the wood has now wandered so far from its nursery of Drummond Hill, that it is constantly flushed in the fir and larch woods for many miles round. At a capercailzie battue last winter, on the confines of Perthshire, several full-feathered cocks were the trophies of the day; no doubt these introductions are foreigners of distinction, and as such we receive them. It is not, however, the decrease of game, either winged or footed, that I fear; the danger rather is, that by over-preserving they will multiply so fast as to become dwarfed or die off by epidemic disease.

The case is very different with our Scottish rivers; their monarch is fast declining both in size and number. We have the prospect, indeed, that a Salmon Bill, by giving some check to these murderous bag-nets, may in time raise his scale in the waters. But what favour can we expect for those outlaws and their marauding chief, to whom Nature has given a dominion in our mountains and glens, yet against whom every hand is raised? It is not, of course, for the pilferers, thriving everywhere and destroying whole nestfuls of eggs, that I would intercede-only for those mighty plunderers associated from boyhood with our wilder sports. We should lament their extinction, and feel that the poetry of their presence was as necessary to complete the savage grandeur of the scene as that of the Red Indian on his prairie.

CAXTONIANA:

A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.

By the Author of The Caxton Family.'

PART VII.

NO. X.-ON THE MORAL EFFECT OF WRITERS.

GODWIN has somewhere remarked on the essential distinction between the moral object and the moral tendency of a work. A writer may present to you, at the end of his book, some unexceptionable dogma which parents would cordially admit into the copy-book ethics of their children, yet, in the process of arriving at his harmless aphorism, he may have led the mind as much astray into mischief as it is in his power to do. On the other hand, a writer may seek to work out a proposition, from the moral truth of which there would be a very general dissent, and yet be either harmless, or often instructive and elevating, from the reasonings which he employs, or even from the mere art which embellishes his composition, and supersedes, in the mind of the reader, the purpose to which the art was applied. For Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of Art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical. Though no Christian can approve the idolatrous worship to which the Parthenon was devoted, or which the Apollo Belvidere represented, few Christians nowadays would deny that the human intellect has been refined and exalted by the study of those masterpieces of Art. The object for which they

were created by their artists is annulled, but their effect is existent and imperishable. It may indeed be said that the refinement or even the elevation of the intellect is not necessarily an improvement to the moral being; and unquestionably it must be owned that an individual, nay sometimes a generation, may combine exquisite refinement of taste with profound corruption of manners-just as it is possible that an individual or a generation may unite a sincere devotion to the mild Christian faith with the savage fanaticism of a follower of Omar; but the salutary effect of Art, as that of Christianity, must be sought not in an individual nor in a generation, but in the concrete masses of society, and in the progressive history of the human race. In Art the salutary effect may not be directly and immediately derived from the original standards, models, and types of Beauty; more often it is to be indirectly and remotely traced, in countless succession, through an intricate variety of minds, to which the originals have suggested new forms of Art, new presentations of Beauty. In the heathen temples of the East originated the outlines of the Gothic architecture now so essentially Christian.

Art, in fact, is the effort of man to express the ideas which Nature suggests to him of a power above Nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which Nature, like himself, is but the effect.

Art employs itself in the study of Nature, for the purpose of imply

there is not some creation which external Nature never produced; in which there are not appeals to sympathies, affections, aspirations

ing, though but by a hint or a symbol, the supernatural. By the word supernatural I mean, not that which is against Nature but, that which is above Nature. Man him--which would be the same in the self, in this sense of the word (the innermost shrine of man's being, if only sense in which Philosophy can external Nature were annihilated, employ it), is supernatural. And and man left a spirit in a world of hence Jacobi, justly termed by Sir spirit. William Hamilton "the pious and profound," says, with felicitous boldness, that it is the supernatural in man which reveals to him the God whom Nature conceals. Mere Nature does not reveal a Deity to such of her children as cannot conceive the supernatural. She does not reveal Him to the cedar and the rose, to the elephant and the moth. Man alone, from his own supernatural—that is, his own spiritual-attribute, conceives at once, even in his most savage state, even in his earliest infancy, the idea of the Supernatural which Nature, without such attribute in man himself, could not reveal to him; and out of that conception is born Art, which we not only degrade, but altogether mistake and falsify, if we call it the imitation of Nature.

The acanthus leaf may suggest the form of a capital to a column; a vista through the forest stems may suggest a peristyle or an aisle. But a temple, whether in Assyria, in Greece, in China, in England, is no imitation of Nature -it is a selection from Nature of certain details arranged into a whole, to which no whole in Nature has resemblance, and intended to convey ideas of a something which man conjectures or divines to be supernatural by reason of the supernatural within himself.

It is thus with art in sculpture, in masonry, in colour; it is so with the nobler art which finds sculpture, masonry, and colour in man's most primitive expression of thoughtLanguage.

There is no work of true Art in language existent, nor can there ever be one, in which there is not expressed the idea of a power beyond external Nature; in which

As, in the art of masonry, sculpture, or colour, the effect of true art is ethical, whatever the original intention or object of the artist-so it is in the art of language. All Genius comprehends Art as its necessity: where there is no art, there can be no genius in a book, any more than without art there can be genius in a picture or a statue. Every book of first-rate genius is and must be a work of first-rate art; though it may be a kind of art so opposed to the fashion of the day that the common criticism of the day, nay even the finest taste of the day, may not detect and appreciate it. Neither Ben Jonson nor even Milton comprehended the sovereign Mastership of Art in Shakespeare. But Shakespeare himself could not have been conscious of his own art. And no writer, whatever his moral object, can foresee what in the course of ages may be the moral effect of his performance.

The satirical design in 'Gulliver's Travels' is certainly not that which philanthropists would commend to the approval of youth. It seeks to mock away all by which man's original nature is refined, softened, exalted, and adorned; it directs the edge of its ridicule at the very roots of those interests and motives by which society has called cities from the quarry, and gardens from the wild; and closes all its assaults upon the framework of civilised communities with the most ruthless libel upon man himself that ever gave the venom of Hate to the stingings of Wit. Yet the book itself, in spite of its design, has no immoral, no misanthropical influence we place it without scruple in the hands of our children: the

lampoon upon humanity is the favourite fairy tale of the nursery. And I doubt if any man can say that he was ever the worse for all that was meant to make him scorn and detest his species in The Voyage to Laputa or the description of the Yahoos; while the art of the book is so wonderful in rendering lifelike the creations of a fancy only second to Shakespeare's in its power of "imagining new worlds," that, age after age, it will contribute to the adornment and improvement of the human race, by perpetual suggestions to the inventive genius by which, from age to age, the human race is adorned or improved. None of us can foresee what great discoveries, even in practical science, may have their first germ in the stimulus given to a child's imaginative ideas by the perusal of a work in which genius has made fiction truthlike, and the marvellous natural. "Wonder," says Aristotle, "is the first cause of philosophy." This is quite as true in the progress of the individual as in that of the concrete mind; and the constant aim of philosophy is to destroy its parent. In vain. Where wonder is ejected from one form it reappears in anothertransmutable always-destructible

never.

But, to return to the distinction betwen the object and the tendency of an author's work. No one would think it necessary to vindicate the morality of Johnson's 'Rasselas,' few would extol the morality in Voltaire's Candide,' yet there is so much similarity in the moral object of the two stories, that Voltaire congratulated himself on having published 'Candide' before 'Rasselas' appeared, otherwise, he said, "I should have been accused of plagiarising the philosophical conception of the distinguished Englishman."

In fact, as two travellers may arrive at the same inn by different roads and in different company, so two writers can arrive at the same moral conclusion through very different paths; and the impression

of the journey left on the mind depends on the features of the country traversed, and the companions one has had by the way. It is not rendered alike in both the travellers because they meet at last under the same sign, and conclude their adventures with a chop off the same mutton.

It is the property of true genius, in proportion as time acts upon its works, to lose its deleterious particles, and retain only those which are innocuous or salutary. The interests of mankind never concede lasting popularity to works that would seriously injure them. Some works, it is true, of an order inferior to that which is assigned to the masterpieces of genius, may be decidedly wicked in their effect if indiscriminately read; but look for them a few generations after their first appearance, and you will never find them amongst the current literature of a people-they will have shrunk out of sight in the obscure corners of learned libraries, referred to only by scholars or historians as illustrations of manners in a bygone age, and read by them with the same cold scientific eye that a physician casts upon specimens of morbid anatomy. The works that remain incorporated in the world's literature all serve to contribute to the world's improvement. Passages, indeed, here and there, as in the classic poets, are extremely censurable; but they sink into insignificance compared with the general excellence of the pervading wholes

If we

as, in mortal life, human imperfections and blemishes little affect the good derivable from the large example of a saint's or a hero's character. From Nature herself we may select partial evil. choose, out of all her products, to take the nightshade for our nutriment, though, beside the hedge in which it lurks, the prodigal corn glitters ripe in the sun, we may certainly harm ourselves, and lay the fault upon Nature; but Nature is not to blame if we devour the nightshade and eschew the corn.

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