necessary to say that such colour and such evanescence of treatment as Reynolds has given to that exquisite group of winged heads in our National Gallery, would have made even the angels of Angelico more angelic. I say nothing of the character of the cherubs of Reynolds. Call them merely beautiful children, if you will. We know they are but portraits, in different views, of one child; but were they as ordinary in character as the children of Murillo, I should still say that, in colour and general treatment, they are among the most angelic things known to the Art, and simply because they are the most natural in the highest sense of the word and I am convinced that the sincere, the truly humble, and therefore the truly teachable Angelico, would have gladly adopted all that Reynolds possessed, beyond himself, could he have seen it ;yes, even though Reynolds has permitted the ringlets. of his cherubs to float loosely on the breath of Heaven, instead of arranging them in sculpturesque regularity over their foreheads with all the formality of a hairdresser; and which, as it accords with the style of the early Italians, is by some critics, and not a few painters, considered essential to the adornment of angelic faces.

A system of imitation that rejects what such men as Titian, Correggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Reynolds, have revealed to the world of the beauties of Nature, is based on a mistake as great as it would be in an astronomer to rest satisfied with the state in which Astronomy was left by Copernicus.*

* I am glad to find that opinions which I expressed to the students of the Royal Academy, five years ago, are in accord

The supposed usurping nature of colour, by which it is thought to draw attention too much from higher qualities, we shall always find has been inferred only from Art in which there is little story or expression; and of such Art it would be nearer the truth to say that the colour does not interfere with the story or expression, but reigns paramount only because the story and expression do not interfere with it. Does not the beauty of Hogarth's colour, instead of interfering in the slightest degree with his story or expression, greatly aid them? When we stand before his pictures in the National Gallery, is their colour, fine as it is, ever the first thing we think or speak

ance with those of Dr. Waagen, from whose letter, addressed "To the Editor of the Times, July 13th, 1854," the following is a quotation :

"Within a few years a school of painters has arisen in England whose aim it is to elevate the character of modern art, not only by the treatment of sacred subjects, but by the adoption of the more or less undeveloped forms of the 15th century. Considering the warm interest I feel for the true advance of art in this country, the kindness and deference with which my opinions are here received by artists and friends of art, and the experience which a German especially has gathered from the results of a similar movement, originating 40 years ago, in his own country, I feel it a kind of obligation to call the attention of the art-loving portion of the public to the real tendency of this school. I need hardly say that I sympathise entirely with the painters of this class, both German and English, in the exceeding attractiveness of that pure and earnest religious feeling which pervades the works of Fiesole and other masters of the 15th century. I also comprehend the liability in their minds to identify the expression of that feeling with the forms peculiar to those masters. At the same time, it is no less true that this identification, and the efforts, however well meant, to which it has led, are totally mis

of?—The truth is, that to a cultivated eye it is bad colour, that which is unnatural, whether from exaggeration or from falling short of the hues of Nature, that attracts attention from the subject and prevents our full enjoyment of whatever other excellences the work may have, just as an instrument out of tune would preclude the ear from the enjoyment of a fine piece of music.

It would be desirable, were it possible, that we should form in our minds a standard of excellence distinct from every particular style that has yet existed; but of such a standard we can only attain an

taken, and can only frustrate that end for which these painters are so zealously labouring. Guided by this erroneous principle, they have sought to transfer to their pictures not only the beauties, but the defects of their great models; unmindful of the fact, which a general survey of the history of art does not fail to teach, that those early masters attract us not on account of their meagre drawing, hard outlines, erroneous perspective, conventional glories, &c., but, on the contrary, in spite of these defects and peculiarities. We overlook these simply and solely because, in the undeveloped state of the scientific and technical resources of painting at that period, they could not be avoided. But it is quite another thing when, under the false impression that the feeling they emulate can be better reared by ignorance than by knowledge, we see these defects and peculiarities transferred to the works of modern artists, who purposely close their eyes to those scientific and technical lights which have now become the common property of art, and retrograde to a state of darkness for which there is no excuse.

"It must be also borne in mind, that the whole style of feeling proper to those early masters, deeply rooted as it was in the religious enthusiasm of their times—of which it may be considered as the highest and most refined fruit—cannot possibly be voluntarily recalled in a period of such totally different tendencies as the present. It stands to reason, therefore, that the pictures even