meddlers have often, though with the best intentions on their part, been the worst enemies of the Arts of this country.

If a great poet be not necessarily a judge of pictures, still less is a great statesman or a great prince likely to find time to become one. We are fond of recurring to the golden age of Leo X., during which, however, Michael Angelo, then in the prime of life, and when his powers as an artist were greater than they had been or ever were again, was shamefully misemployed. His great works in the Sistine Chapel were stopped, and he was banished to the mountains of Pietra Santa, during almost the entire pontificate of Leo, there to do the work of an engineer! That the greatest works of Art, since its revival, graced the ages of Julius II. and Leo X., is, I am inclined to think, traceable to a rare and fortunate concurrence of circumstances, rather than to any remarkable taste in those Popes, other than a general love of the magnificent.

But I would fain hope, though the highest excellences in all the fine Arts are addressed only to the few, yet that few is not so small a number as may be supposed; for I believe thousands of modest minds pass silently through the world, unheard of, whose lives are sweetened by their gentle influences, and whose real enjoyments in matters of taste are far greater than the enjoyments of many who are publicly known as patrons.

But to return to our subject.-"The eye," as Sir Charles Eastlake says, "has its own poetry;" and it is of great importance that we keep in mind the distinction between a poetic thought or incident and the

poetry that is inherent in Painting, and without which Painting is not a fine art.

In the "Cephalus and Aurora," of Nicolo Poussin in our National Gallery, the substitution of Apollo for the rising sun, as he has managed it, is in the highest degree poetic. But the thought alone is a mere imitation of the poets, which might have occurred to the most prosaic mind. It is entirely, therefore, to the technical treatment-to the colour, and to the manner in which the forms of the chariot and horses of the god melt into the shapes of clouds, in fact, to the chiaroscuro, that the incident, as connected with the picture, owes its poetry; and the same technical qualities in the hands of Rembrandt, in one of his finest landscapes, make the sails of a windmill, from which the last glow of evening is reflected, eminently poetic.

Mr. Ruskin has noticed incidents in the pictures of Tintoret that show how fine an imagination he possessed; but had not his light and shadow and his colour been of a high order, the works containing these incidents would have passed into oblivion.

I have never seen the "Polyphemus" of Nicolo Poussin. To judge from copies, its effect should be light and silvery; but the engraving, alone, shows it to me as the most poetic of all the landscape compositions of this eminently poetic painter. It is made up of the most beautiful and romantic features of Nature, and richly peopled from classic poetry. The fountain in the foreground, flowing from the urn of a river god, and tended in its course by a beautiful group of nymphs, tells us of the death of Acis. One

of the nymphs turns to the distant sea, in which Galatea has hid herself, and from which Polyphemus endeavours to draw her forth by his rude minstrelsy. So I understand the picture. But, whether or not I translate it aright, its impression is equally poetic, and was so to me before I looked for the story. Its great feature, the form of the giant relieved upon the bright sky as he sits on his rocky throne, owes its grandeur to the strictly technical principles of perspective, linear and aerial; and if the painters of antiquity were, as some have supposed, unacquainted with the laws of this science, it is clear that Zeuxis himself could not have given the sublimity this subject has received at the hands of the French painter; and we are sure that neither Orcagna nor any Italian, before perspective or chiaroscuro (which includes aerial perspective) were understood, could have effected such an impression.

In endeavouring to enforce the importance of technical qualities, I do not undervalue the high conceptions of Art. But I wish to draw attention to the only means by which they can be fully displayed. These means are the things that are proper to painting alone, and which it is too much the fashion to depreciate, as merely technical, merely ornamental, or merely sensual.

I would say to the painter who undervalues these,Tell your story, describe your scene, express your sentiment, or display your learning in words, and you may arrive at the honours of a poet or a philosopher; but do not attempt to do so in a language with which you have made yourself but imperfectly acquainted, because you were insensible to its worth,—and expect

to share the reward of those who are skilled in that language, though they may not possess your imagination or your knowledge of books.

Let us not be duped by words. Let us remember that what is technical in Painting has not yet been achieved with the perfection that may be imagined even by the greatest artists ;-that what is ornamental is an imitation of the ornaments with which the Creator has decorated every work of his hands; and that what is sensual is only so, in an evil sense, by an abuse of his gifts.

There is no word in our language more often misapplied to Art than this word sensual-no modes of reasoning more erroneous than those of late so much in use, based on analogies, that have no real existence, between the pleasures of sense. A modern, accomplished, and eloquent writer,* following a notion of Blake, deprecates, for instance, the occasional softening of the outline, by comparing it to "that lax morality which confounds the limits of light and darkness, right and wrong." Not being a painter, he is not aware that he is here objecting to the truest imitation of Nature.

Again he says, "We find the purest and brightest colours only in Fra Angelico's pictures, with a general predominance of blue, which we have observed to prevail more or less in so many of the semi-Byzantine painters; and which, fanciful as it may appear, I cannot but attribute, independently of mere tradition, to an inherent, instinctive sympathy between their mental constitution and the colour in question, as * Lord Lindsay.

that of red or of blood may be observed to prevail among painters in whom Sense or Nature predominates over Spirit." Now why, I would ask, is the reasoning in this passage to be confined to the colours of red and of blue-Why may it not discover that painters in whom avarice predominates are fond of yellow because it is the colour of gold,—and so on? But, in truth, the sensual Correggio seems less fond of red than almost any other painter. In all his works, with which I am acquainted, it is very sparingly introduced, while nothing can exceed the refinement with which delicate blues (and he was very fond of blue) are managed by him. Then, again, a distinction seems implied, in the passage I have quoted, between the Spiritual and the Natural, as if it were possible to express the spiritual by any other medium than the natural. A painter, it is true, may be very natural without being spiritual, but that which is spiritual in Art can only be fully developed in the degree in which the painter is natural.

Though I know little of the works of Fra Angelico, I will not question the justice of the praises that have been given to him by his warmest admirers. I do not envy the man who can read the accounts handed down to us of the character and habits of this sainted painter, and his heart not be warmed. Such a being, so purified from all earthly stain, and living a life so entirely above the world, endued also with genius and taste, must have been, as he was felt to be by his contemporaries, the fittest painter, of that time, of angels. But then he could only bring to the task the imperfect art he possessed, and it seems to me a fatal sign against all healthy progress in Painting, that it is