though not the precise curve of Hogarth, as the line of beauty, "a variously undulating curve may therefore be proposed as the visible type of life: such a form is constantly found in nature, as the indication and concomitant of life itself. It was this which Hogarth detected in various examples, without tracing it to its source. His illustrations are often excellent, but the type itself he adopted was singularly unfortunate. His "line of beauty" constantly repeats itself, and is therefore devoid of variety or elasticity--the never-failing accompaniments of perfect vitality." Variation, whether of line or of other elements, has on all hands been admitted as an ingredient of beauty. Mr Burke's illustration of the dove is good: "Here we see the head increasing insensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens gradually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses itself in a larger swell, which continues to the middle of the body, when the whole decreases again to the tail. The tail takes a new direction, but it soon varies its new course; it blends again with the other parts, and the line is perpetually changing above, below, upon every side." Burke adds to this the other element--softness--which, we suspect, Mr Eastlake will admit only in a minor degree; for Mr Burke considers not only softness, but a certain degree of weakness--a delicacy almost amounting to it, at least--as necessary to the idea of beauty; and they would ill agree with the perfect "vitality" of our author. But simply as to lines, we are inclined to believe with Burke, that though the varied line is that in which beauty is found most complete, there is no particular line which constitutes it. Mr Eastlake, in referring that line to its resemblance to life, or to the antagonistic principles that make and destroy life, if we mistake not, cautiously abstracts this line of beauty from ideas of association; whereas his whole argument, in form and matter, appears to be one of association only. But such an association of life may be, if it existed, often destructive of that impression which a beautiful object is intended to make. Lassitude, death itself, may be beautiful in form. When Virgil compares Euryalus dying to the flower cut down--to the poppies drooping, weighed down with rain--he has in his eye objects beautiful in themselves; rather than life, they express Burke's idea of a certain weakness and faintness. Inque humeros cervix collapsa recumbit. Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro, Languescit moriens; lassove papavera collo, Demisere caput, pluviâ cùm fortè gravantur.