parent colour were put over it: red, frequently, we believe, by Titian, before the brown shadows-yellow sometimes by Rubens-whatever warm tone might be chosen for the key of the composition, and for the support of its greys, depended for its own value upon the white gesso beneath; nor can any system of colour be ultimately successful which excludes it. Noble arrangement, choice, and relation of colour, will indeed redeem and recommend the falsest system: our own Reynolds, and recently Turner, furnish magnificent examples of the power attainable by colourists of high calibre, after the light ground is lost (we cannot agree with Mr. Eastlake in thinking the practice of painting first in white and black, with cool reds only, equivalent to its preservation') :—but in the works of both, diminished splendour and sacrificed durability attest and punish the neglect of the best resources of their art.

We have stated, though briefly, the major part of the data which recent research has furnished respecting the early colourists; enough, certainly, to remove all theoretical obstacles to the attainment of a perfection equal to theirs. A few carefully conducted experiments, with the efficient aids of modern chemistry, would probably put us in possession of an amber varnish, if indeed this be necessary, at least not inferior to that which they employed; the rest of their materials are already in our hands, soliciting only such care in their preparation as it ought, we think, to be no irksome duty to bestow. Yet we are not sanguine of the immediate result. Mr. Eastlake has done his duty excellently; but it is hardly to be expected that, after being long in possession of means which we could apply to no profit, the knowledge that the greatest men possessed no better, should at once urge to emulation and gift with strength. We believe that some consciousness of their true position already existed in the minds of many living artists; example had at least been given by two of our Academicians, Mr. Mulready and Mr. Etty, of a splendour based on the Flemish system, and consistent, certainly, in the first case, with a high degree of permanence; while the main direction of artistic and public sympathy to works of a character altogether opposed to theirs, showed fatally how far more perceptible and appreciable to our present instincts is the mechanism of handling than the melody of hue. Indeed we firmly believe, that of all powers of enjoyment or of judgment, that which is concerned with nobility of colour is least communicable: it is also perhaps the most rare. The achievements of the draughtsman are met by the curiosity of all mankind; the appeals of the dramatist answered by their sympathy; the creatures of imagination acknowledged by their fear; but the voice of the colourist has but the adder's listening, charm

he

he never so wisely. Men vie with each other, untaught, in pursuit of smoothness and smallness-of Carlo Dolci and Van Huysum; their domestic hearts may range them in faithful armies round the throne of Raphael; meditation and labour may raise them to the level of the great mountain pedestal of Buonarotti-vestito gia de' raggi del pianeta, che meno dritto altrui per ogni calle;' but neither time nor teaching will bestow the sense, when it is not innate, of that wherein consists the power of Titian and the great Venetians. There is proof of this in the various degrees of cost and care devoted to the preservation of their works. The glass, the curtain, and the cabinet guard the preciousness of what is petty, guide curiosity to what is popular, invoke worship to what is mighty;-Raphael has his palace-Michael his dome-respect protects and crowds traverse the sacristy and the saloon; but the frescoes of Titian fade in the solitudes of Padua, and the gesso falls crumbled from the flapping canvas, as the sea-winds shake the Scuola di San Rocco.

But if, on the one hand, mere abstract excellence of colour be thus coldly regarded, it is equally certain that no work ever attains enduring celebrity which is eminently deficient in this great respect. Colour cannot be indifferent; it is either beautiful and auxiliary to the purposes of the picture, or false, froward, and opposite to them. Even in the painting of Nature herself, this law is palpable; chiefly glorious when colour is a predominant element in her working, she is in the next degree most impressive when it is withdrawn altogether: and forms and scenes become sublime in the neutral twilight, which were indifferent in the colours of noon. Much more is this the case in the feebleness of imitation; all colour is bad which is less than beautiful; all is gross and intrusive which is not attractive; it repels where it cannot enthral, and destroys what it cannot assist. It is besides the painter's peculiar craft; he who cannot colour is no painter. It is not painting to grind earths with oil and lay them smoothly on a surface. He only is a painter who can melodize and harmonize hue-if he fail in this, he is no member of the brotherhood. Let him etch, or draw, or carve: better the unerring graver than the unfaithful pencil-better the true sling and stone than the brightness of the unproved armour. And let not even those who deal in the deeper magic, and feel in themselves the loftier power, presume upon that power-nor believe in the reality of any success unless that which has been deserved by deliberate, resolute, successive operation. We would neither deny nor disguise the influences of sensibility or of imagination, upon this, as upon every other admirable quality of art;—we know that there is that in the very stroke and fall of the pencil in a master's hand, which creates

colour

colour with an unconscious enchantment-we know that there is a brilliancy which springs from the joy of the painter's heart-a gloom which sympathizes with its seriousness- -a power correlative with its will; but these are all vain unless they be ruled by a seemly caution-a manly moderation-an indivertible foresight. This we think the one great conclusion to be received from the work we have been examining, that all power is vain-all invention vain all enthusiasm vain-all devotion even, and fidelity vain, unless these are guided by such severe and exact law as we see take place in the developement of every great natural glory; and, even in the full glow of their bright and burning operation, sealed by the cold, majestic, deep-graven impress of the signet on the right hand of Time.

ART. IV.-The Princess, a Medley. By Alfred Tennyson. London. 12mo. 1848.

IN N his lately published Notes from Life' which, delightfully as they read in prose, we would gladly have seen embodied in a new Task,' with such a cement of imagery and in such a framework of verse as the author of Philip Van Artevelde has at command, Mr. Henry Taylor considers the period when the poet ought to deem himself qualified for the exercise of his vocation on a large scale, and decides that, from the preparations required, this period will not arrive early. After citing the authority and example of Milton, who even in his twenty-ninth year regarded his efforts as a plucking of the berries harsh and crude,' and who composed his great Epic in declining age, he observes that Milton's poetical faculties, as the history of poetry at large would show, were not of slower growth than those of other poets of the high and intellectual orders,' and that at all events the culmination of such poets is in middle life.'

That poets do not reach their zenith, as poets, in early youth, and that poetic works of large compass are not produced before the middle of life, seem to be indisputable positions. Very little poetry, that is not plainly immature and imperfect of its kind, has ever been produced by youths under twenty years of age: many women and aged men have written better poems than even the greatest poets have produced in boyhood. But Mr. Taylor proceeds to say that more illustrious examples of poetical achievement may be found belonging to periods beyond middle life than can be cited as belonging to the periods short of it;* and this assertion, if by middle life be meant a period not commencing till

*Notes,' &c., p. 184- The Life Poetic.'

after

after thirty nor terminating till after fifty, involves a view of the subject to which we cannot so readily subscribe. Literary history, we believe, lends considerable support to our opinion, that the poetical faculty, though seldom largely developed in boyhood, has an especial connexion with youth; that in many cases it is full grown while the other intellectual faculties are yet growing; that it often is in the decline while other powers of the mind are in entire vigour. If a large proportion of all the noblest poetry which the world has seen-and this we concede to Mr. Taylor-has been conceived and executed by men between thirty and forty-five; if much that is first-rate in its way has been produced at a still more advanced age; it appears equally true that no small amount of genuine poetry, excellent in its kind and fit to live for its own sake, has proceeded from men under thirty: and if we extend the period of youth till five or six and thirty, we may even say that no small proportion of the finest poetry extant has been written by young men. Are the earlier productions of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, and Milton immature fruits? are they not young but full-grown poetry, graceful as the beardless Apollo?' It is commonly felt that in Romeo and Juliet, the Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth, the author had reached perfection in one style of poetic art; and the world could scarcely better spare the Allegro and Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas, than part with Paradise Lost. Those 'crude and harsh berries,' as their producer with a large poetical licence chose to style them, will ever rank high among the fruits of the poetical vineyard: they are ripe grapes of no mean flavour; in sweetness, if not in the potency of the juice, inferior to none. Jonson is said to have written Every Man in his Humour at about two-and-twenty; the Fox, the Alchemist, and Silent Woman by the time he was thirty-six. Beaumont, the associate of Fletcher in some of his finest plays, died at nine-and-twenty. All the more imaginative verse of Pope appeared before he was thirty years old; Thomson's Seasons belong to the same period of life; and Burns had immortalized his name at twenty-seven. Gray never produced a better poem no man has produced a better of its kind-than his Elegy in a Country Churchyard; and this seems to have been partly done in his twentysixth year, when he published some of his best odes, especially the Prospect of Eton College. The poetry of Catullus, so perfect in its style, the poetry of Crashaw and of Collins, of Gellert and of Bürger, of Coleridge and Byron for the most part, of Shelley entirely, was the poetry of youth. Akenside, rather too magnificently styled the British Lucretius,' published the Pleasures

Pleasures of Imagination in his twenty-third year. Men differ in their estimate of poetic excellence, and there are some to whom poetry is worth little except as the decorated shrine, the graceful framework of sage reflection and various knowledge of life and affairs; but those who love the poetical for its own. sake, even when it teaches nothing but itself, that is, when it merely exhibits the poetical aspect of things, and illustrates a certain mode and attitude of the human mind, will hesitate to admit that the poet ripens as slowly as the statesman or the general, the historian or philosophic divine.

To proceed with our survey. Schiller had written some of the plays on which his poetical reputation rests-The Robbers and Don Carlos-before he completed his twenty-eighth year. Wallenstein he composed about the same period when Dante was occupied with the Divina Commedia the first stage of middle life. Klopstock obtained celebrity by three cantos of the Messiah at twenty-four; and Goethe had become poetically famous before he was twenty-five; Faust was early planned but late finished; it was composed at intervals during the course of half a century. Sir Walter Scott wrote with youthful spirit both early and late; but the willowy grey' was hardly peeping out beneath the laurel on his illustrious head, when he delighted the world with the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion. Thalaba was written in about six weeks, in Southey's six-andtwentieth year. The poem breathes of youth all over; it expresses the keenness of youthful sorrow, the ardour of youthful hope, the glow and triumph of youthful joy; yet it is far from boyish or immature. And how was it with the great philosophic poet of our age? It might be supposed that his poetic mind grew, like the oak or the cedar, slowly and gradually, and attained not its full size and adult solidity till a thousand larches of literature, with their slight poverty-stricken foliage, had sprung up and perished around him: yet the fact is that many of the poems on which his genius is most strongly impressed were produced before he had reached the middle of life:-Tintern Abbey and the Old Cumberland Beggar, for instance, to judge by the dates annexed, must have been written when he was but twenty-seven-ten years before the age when Petrarch obtained the poetic crown. The Female Vagrant he composed at about one-and-twenty, and that poem, both in conception and in versification, is very mature in its line. His grand ode on Intimations of Immortality was written when he was advancing towards the mezzo cammin. The writings of his later day are, for some readers, the most beautiful portion of his works; but such is not the feeling of his devoted admirers in general, or of

those