fome people with so much eagerness to the gaming-table. There the continual expectation of events, on which a great deal is depending, and of which we can, with no degree of certainty, form the least conjecture, keeps the attention awake to an extreme degree; which always prepares the mind for receiving a strong impreflion. If we be interested in the event, our paflions of hope and fear, being gratified in their turn, greatly augment the internal agitation, fo as often to carry it beyond the limits of pleasure, and make it terminate in the most painful and tormenting anxiety.

LECTURE

GREAT

objects please us for the fame reafon that new objects do, viz. by the exercise they give to our faculties. The mind, as was observed before, conforming and adapting itself to the objects to which its attention is engaged, muft, as it were, enlarge itself, to conceive a great object. This requires a confiderable effort of the imagination, which is also attended with a pleasing, though perhaps not a diftinct and explicit consciousness of the strength and extent of our own powers.

As the ideas of great and little are confeffedly relative, and have no existence but what they derive from a comparison with other ideas; hence, in all fublime conceptions, there is a kind of secret retrospect to preceding ideas and ftates of mind. The fublime, therefore, of all the fpecies of excellence in compofition, requires the moft to be intermixed with ideas of an intermediate nature, as these contribute not a little, by their contrast, to raise and aggrandize ideas which are of a rank fuperior to themselves. Whenever any object, how great foever, becomes familiar to

the

the mind, and its relations to other objects is no longer attended to, the fublime vanishes. Milton's battle of the angels, after the prelude to the engagement, would have been read with no greater emotions than are excited by the history of a common battle, had not the poet perpetually reinforced his fublime, as it were, by introducing frequent comparisons of thofe fuperior beings, and their actions, with human combatants and human efforts. It is plainly by means of comparison that Horace gives us fo fubline an idea of the unconquerable firmnefs of Cato;

Et cuncta terrarum fubacta,

Præter atrocem animum Catonis.

For the fame reafon a well-conducted climax is extremely favourable to the fublime. In this form of a fentence, each fubfequent idea is compared with the preceding; fo that if the former have been represented as large, the latter, which exceeds it, must appear exceedingly large. The effect of this we fee in that fublime paffage of Shakespeare, infcribed upon his monument in Westminster Abbey:

The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The folemn temples, the great globe itself,
And all which it inherit, fhall diffolve,
And, like the bafelefs fabric of a vision,
Shall leave no wreck behind.

The

The intermediate ideas which are introduced to increase the fublime, by means of comparison with the object whofe grandeur is to be inhanced by them, ought to be of a fimilar nature; because there is no comparison of things diffimilar. The difference between them fhould be nothing more than that of greater and lefs: and even in this cafe, it often happens that the contraft of things between which there is a very great disparity (as will be explained hereafter) produces the burlefque, a fentiment of a quite oppofite nature to the fublime. It is not improbable but that many of Mr. Pope's readers may affix ludicrous ideas to the following lines, which, in his own conception, and that of his more philofophical readers, were very fublime.

Who fees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a fparrow fall;

Atoms, or fyftems, into ruin hurl'd;

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

ESSAY ON MAN. Ep. I.

Sparrows, atoms, and bubbles, do not make the fanie figure in the eye of the generality of mankind, that they do in that of a philofopher.

It follows from thefe principles, that no conception can be fublime which is not fimple. If any scene presents a crowd of feparate objects, the mind views them in fucceffion, though in a very quick and rapid one, and exerts no extraordinary effort to conceive and comprehend any of them.

However,

However, an idea that doth consist of parts may appear fublime, if the parts of which it confifts be not attended to, but the aggregate of them all be perceived as one idea. This is easily illuftrated by the ideas of numbers. Very large numbers, as

a thoufand, ten thousand, and a hundred thousand, prefent great and fublime ideas upon the first naming of them, which continue fo long as we endeavour to furvey the whole of them at once, without attempting to refolve them into their component parts; but the arithmetician, who is used to compofe and decompofe the largest numbers, is confcious of no fublime idea, even when he is performing the operations of addition and multiplication upon them.

Objects of the first rank in point of magnitude, and which chiefly conftitute the fublime of defcription, are large rivers, high mountains, and extenfive plains; the ocean, the clouds, the hea› vens, and infinite space; also storms, thunder, lightning, volcanos, and earthquakes, in nature; and palaces, temples, pyramids, cities, &c. in the works of men. See a fine enumeration of thofe fcenes of nature, which contribute the moft to the fublime, in Akenfide upon this fubject:

Who but rather turns

To heaven's broad fire his unconstrained view,
Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame?
Who that, from Alpine heights, his lab'ring eye

Shoots