Observation** of nature is the only source of truth. Discursive observation is the art of noticing circumstances evident to the senses. Men who do this intentionally and carefully, with a view of acquiring a knowledge of phenomena and their causes, are distinguished for their varied knowledge and often for their great discoveries. Shakspere must have owed the varied facts interwoven into his delineations of human character to this source. The clever personations of Garrick were suggested by his curious observations of men and manners. Sir Walter Scott is known to have been a careful observer. It is said, 'no expression escaped him if it bore on the illustration of character.' ** The term observation is used here in the sense in which it is commonly understood, signifying cognisance in general. It includes whatever information we acquire by the meant of consciousness, or experience, or through the agency of the senses. Claude Lorraine, with a passionate sympathy for the beautiful, sate in the fields from sun-rise to dewy eve, watching, catching, and saturating his very soul, as it were, with all the evanescent beauties of a summer's day, as they chased each other over the face of the fair scene; fixing on canvass, taking captive and imprisoning in our cabinets, the wanton daughters of nature, that before his time never were caught, but flitted before the fascinated eye only long enough to make the heart afterwards feel more achingly the void of their vanishing. And the artist who has done all this, do we not justly call him an _imaginative_ painter, to distinguish him from those meaner geniuses who were, in painting, very like Crabbe in poetry, merely faithful delineators of the vulgarer objects of social life, bunches of carrots, drunken boors, chamber maids and chimney corners.