and the susceptibility to impressions which renders the subject liable to suffering. Shakspeare, seldom wrong in his contemplation of nature, has in this regard fallen into a great error when he tells us, that

"the poor beetle that we tread upon

In mortal sufferance feels a pang as great
As when a giant dies."

The philosopher, better informed than the poet, is glad to learn that the whole class of unprotected creatures are very little sensible to pain, as far as can be inferred from their anatomical structure and their habits closely observed. And this is true of various ages as well as different orders, which indeed present a striking analogy. Thus the young of all animals, and especially of our own species, whose helplessness and loud wailing attract so much kindly sympathy, suffer much less than they seem, being in a great measure, nay, almost absolutely, protected by the triple shield of a proportional and happy insensibility. With Wordsworth, "it is my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes." But if sunshine and the zephyr, if the blessed south wind and the soft summer beam give pleasure by expanding the blossom and the leaf, it is clear that the keen arid blast of autumn and the tempestuous darkness of the winter night must curdle its living juices, and wither painfully its stem and bud. In the numerous tribes of the animal creation, are added thought, locomotion, and social impulses; and lastly, a moral power being interfused into the more developed intellect and finer organization, we have man, in whose elevated and complex nature life and immortality are fully brought to light. The higher we rise, the more inlets of impression we meet with; of course there is more suffering, but of course also more enjoyment, the balance running, as far as we can judge from universal

experience and observation, steadily in favor of the nicer degrees of susceptibility to both. Hence, as education heightens the delicacy of our perceptions, we have a definite relation established between the progress of civilization and the development of the capacities for happiness. The Australian savage is a man. So, say naturalists, is the Foulah, the Caffre, the Hottentot. Of the African variety, Tiedemann affirms, while he demonstrates the contrary, that his brain is as large as that of the white man of Caucasus, of the Rhine, of Lombardy. The brain of the wild New Zealander is larger than that of either. The nervous system is to appearance much the same in them all; the hand of each is of similar structure, the eye alike in all. But the man of "the Alps and Apeninnes, the Pyrenæan and the river Po," the man of Canton, Athens, and Jerusalem, cooks his food, builds palaces and temples, and has wrought out many arts and inventions, which he calls useful arts and sciences, and fine arts. Compared with the savage condition, we say he is civilized and refined. At every step of his departure from that condition, a new want has arisen or been imagined; and refined life consists of little more, in the mass, than an unbroken series of efforts to supply such wants. The hand, originally a mere instrument of prehension, very like that of the simia or chimpanzee, has been educated to a thousand nice and wonderful offices. It hews the figure of a god from a shapeless block of marble; directs the lightning and averts the thunderbolt; traces with minute lines and dots on a plane surface the lights and shades and features of a landscape; writes with a sunbeam; controls with a touch and manages the mighty force of vapor; and with the pen or the type, gives clearness and permanence to the flying word and the passing thought. The brain, no longer a mere organ of perception and volition, has learned to imagine beauty and comprehend sublimity; to plan, to con

trive, to engender quips and cranks; what marvel, then, that it is stuffed full too of cares and anxieties! Is there nothing to choose between the huge cerebral mass of a truculent cannibal, and the neat but small enclosure, alive and active, every delicate fibre of it, under the bonnet of a witty French woman ?-let the former be as stupid, stolid and reckless as you please, both of the present and the future, and the latter be tortured with every petty wile of intrigue, every anxious care of self-important diplomacy. Why speak of the education of the ear, the eye, the palate? When the savage is hungry he feeds himself to satiety. What knows he of savory viands and agreeable flavors? Hunger, says the coarse proverb, is the best sauce; it is his only one, and gives an equal relish, as we have heard, to the raw liver of an expiring buffalo, the quivering muscle of an Abyssinian ox, or the flesh of a fellow biped. He hears the slightest sounds which portend danger or give warning, but musical nature to him is dumb. Yet rude as he is, the gentle murmur of the rippling stream; the rushing of the tide with measured swell upon the sea-beaten shore; the majestic breathings of the winds among the branches of the eternal forests which give him shelter, must, if it be only mechanically, affect his senses and lull him to repose. He can see like an eagle; nothing escapes his practiced vision-the smoke of his distant encampment, the slightest impress of his enemy's footstep, the wild beast afar off, whom his necessities impel him to pursue or shun. But his eye appreciates no pictured beauty, either of form or coloring. For him, the soft green of the valley and the brilliant hues of manytinted flowers, the sunny landscape, with its glorious diversity of hill and dale and meandering rivulet, are spread forth in vain. Can it be, that for such senses as his, our bountiful Father willed into being this infinite exhibition of exquisite grace and grandeur.

What is civilization but the suggestion of wants and the invention of means to satisfy them? It is an error to affirm, as is often done, that in this matter "the demand creates the supply." "The first seats of commerce," says Heeren, "were also the first seats of civilization. Exchange of merchandise led to exchange of ideas; and by this mutual friction was first kindled the sacred flame of humanity." This is a striking and graphic expression of a great truth. Commerce began by an interchange or barter of the mere necessaries of life. The planter of the riverside offered bread in exchange for the salt and dried flesh of the desert hunter. But to this market of food those who had none to offer, brought, to obtain it, spices and frankincense, and gold, and silver, and precious stones, as they could procure them. What can be more evident than that the desire for all these in turn was suggested from without, was matter of reciprocal education-a step in civilization? Here it was clearly the supply that created the demand; the demand reacting has increased the supply. The Hindoo, with the aid of the Englishman, taught the Chinese the delights of opium-eating and smoking; the Mandarin communicated to "the foreign devils outside, red bristled and barbarous," the aromatic joys of "the cup that cheers but not inebriates." As love, in the most exquisite of German stories created a soul in Undine, so a new want gives a new life to whomsoever feels it, provided it can be gratified; and the tea-drinking laundress of the present day knows an enjoyment, a refined one too, and admitting of repetition with fresh delight at "each return of morn and dewy eve," which England's virgin queen at her breakfast of beef and ale might have envied, but was perhaps not yet refined enough to relish or appreciate.

The most artificial of the wants thus generated in the progress of man from barbarism to civilization-such as

he has yet attained-is that which we next come to consider as supplied by what are called the fine arts. Concerning the ultimate influence of these upon the well-being of society, there has been warm and long sustained dispute; and not a few stern stoics have denounced them as injurious to good morals and opposed to useful industry. It has been argued, that they lead by their softening agencies to instability of character and effeminacy, with its long train of vices; and the example has been pressed, of repeated coincidence between their most flourishing cultivation, and the prevalence of general corruption in ancient Greece and Rome, and in modern Italy. I allude here only to music, sculpture, and painting. Poetry merges all her peculiar influences in those of literature, already discussed, and architecture is at least equally well arranged among the useful as the fine arts.

Painting, of which I shall first speak, with all its immediate kindred, etching, engraving, lithography, &c., may doubtless, like the pen and the press, exert an injurious effect, and be made efficiently instrumental for harm. The bad passions and propensities may be addressed through the eye, with great force and quickness; and impressions made thus upon the mind, are so tenacious as often to prove almost indelible. Yet must I differ from those who maintain, that more evil is done by these perverse uses of the pencil, than good by its correct and laudable employment. Apply the test formerly proposed. Obliterate from the canvass, the plate of copper, steel, and wood, and the graphic stone, all that the most prolific and prurient imagination has ever traced of indecorous and seductive, and what will you have effected in the cause of virtue? Vice will have lost from her copious armory little or nothing of importance; nothing that the dullest of her votaries would need to spur him onward in his oblique career. On the contrary, how many im