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Fingal's bard, was there; the sweet tree of the Hill of Cona. He praised the Daughter of Snow, and Morven's highdescended chief. The Daughter of Snow overheard, and left the hall of her secret sigh. She came in all her beauty, like the moon from a cloud in the east. Loveliness was around her, as light. Her steps were like the music of songs." Surely Homer has nothing, in its kind, superior to this.

LANDSCAPE PAINTING ;-LANDSCAPE PAINTERS.

Of all departments of the pictorial art, none has so great a power to charm the lover of Nature, as the landscape. For though he is willing to give all due applause to portrait and historic painting, and would allow appropriate praise even to the lodges of Raphael, the drolleries of Brewer, and the grotesque pieces of Mortuus Feltrensis and Leonardo de Vinci, he is far less charmed with any efforts of the painter, than with a full, a clear, and well delineated landscape. In this department of his art, the painter's subjects are unlimited. Every object having its varied and appropriate blending of colour, each tree, flower, and plant gives scope for his talents: his rocks are green with the living moss, and peopled with the bounding goat; his forests are clothed in the shade of summer, or in the varied foliage of autumn; his hills are capped with snow; his vineyards bend beneath their purple wealth.

An artist is of every country:-he translates the temples, theatres, and aqueducts of Rome, the pyramids of Egypt, and the pillars of Heliopolis and Palmyra, on an English wall. For him, the Pays de Vaud glows with its soft and enchanting perspectives;-Engelberg frowns with its masses of rocks ; -St. Gothard bends beneath the weight of its snows; the bird of paradise hovers in enjoyment, far from her native Gilolo; and the sensitive Melissa blooms upon a northern canvas. The vales of Savoy; the glens of Media; the savannahs of Africa; the rocks of Norway; the groves of Italy;

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the mountains of the west;-all quit their native soils, and hang suspended in a British palace.

Ancient painters were not so rich in natural objects with which to exercise their genius as the modern. They knew nothing of China, Japan, or the Asiatic islands: Polynesia, Australasia, or America and not much of the northern parts of Europe. They knew no flowers so beautiful as those of the Cape; no trees so magnificent as those of South America; nor any insects so splendid as those of Australia. They were almost entirely insensible, also, to the pleasure derivable from the contemplation of ruins; though Servius Sulpitius, Cicero, and Pliny the Younger, seem, in some degree, to have been susceptible of that "divine sensation."

"If your Grace," said Sir John Vanbrugh to the Duchess of Marlborough, "desire to have a garden, truly elegant, you must apply for a plan to the best painters of landscape a."

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The landscapes of BLOEMEN of Antwerp were generally decorated with mutilated statues and basso-relievos; with ruins; and light and elegant specimens of architecture: objects which contributed to give additional interest to figures, habited after oriental fashions, and remarkable for spirited lightness, and graceful inflexion. MOLYN, in a peculiar manner, delighted in exhibiting the ocean, in all its sublime and terrible forms and, from his passion for tempests and shipwrecks, he acquired the appellation of Tempesta. In poetical delineation of marine landscape, Homer (Odyssey), Virgil, Camoens, and Falconer, bear the palm from all competitors.

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In every instance, landscape painters should tell a striking history; and not only ought they to select a fine landscape for their study and admiration, but a proper time for exhibiting it for man scarcely differs more from man, than one scene differs from itself. What is lovely in the morning is, frequently, dull and uninteresting when the sun is in its meridian. For in the morning and evening, the shades of sepa

Harris's Philos. Arrangements, ch. xiv. 353.

rate objects act upon each other, as contrasts: whereas at noon, the sun shooting its rays perpendicularly rather than horizontally, even the shadow of Etna, which at intervals throws itself to the distance of two hundred and twenty miles, is a comparative dwarf.

This taste for selection characterised LORENESSE; who, attending to the varied phenomena of the heavens, and aided by an Italian climate, produced the richest and most beautifully fringed horizons, it is possible to conceive. BERGHEM of Haerlem had the faculty of exhibiting great variety in his landscapes. With variety he united beauty, compass, and grandeur. Mathematically correct in his proportions, he was no less faithful in the essential requisites of light and shade, proximity and distance. His colours are luminous, almost to transparency; and his clouds suspend in so natural a manner, that they seem to float at the discretion of the winds. His pieces, too, are agreeably embellished with figures.

CASTIGLIONE excelled principally in the drawing of castles, and abbeys; in which no master has surpassed him. His sketches of rural scenery are agreeable and faithful; but they are far inferior to the bolder efforts of his pencil. SNEYDERS of Antwerp excelled every artist in the delineation of hunting pieces. He may be styled the Somerville of painting. EDEMA of Antwerp painted precipices and cataracts; and even voyaged to Norway and Newfoundland to collect subjects for his pencil. BAMBOCCIO studied at Rome; but derived more from the environs of that celebrated city, than from the works of its greatest masters. He was so minute an observer, that no scene, which struck him, was ever lost to his memory. His imagination was in the highest degree elastic; and, like JORDAENS, his faculty in delineating was nearly as active, as his powers of combination. In looking at BAMBOCCIO's pieces, the eye is completely deluded; for the distances being well preserved, each has its appropriate relief, and every shade its characteristic tint.

GIOVANNI DELLA VITE delighted, after the manner of Bamboccio, to diversify his pictures with hordes of beggars, groups of gypseys and hunters; and in exhibiting the agreeable variety of pastoral life. This painter is said to have once drawn the outlines of a picture in his sleep. The muse of Milton, in the same manner, dictated to him slumbering ; while Maignanus of Toulouse perfected theorems; and Cædmon, the Saxon poet, wrote verses, while they slept. HOBBIMA of Antwerp may be styled the "painter of solitude;" since he introduces but few figures into his landscapes. Nature was his mistress; and he copied her with precision. A perfect master of perspective, whether he exhibits the head of a river or a lake, a temple, a grotto, or a ruin, the eye is deceived in a very agreeable manner.

In the knowledge of perspective, the Chinese, as well as the ancient masters, are said to have been strikingly deficient; yet, it has been asserted, by several intelligent travellers, that the art of delineating landscape is in higher perfection than that of history or portrait in China; while, on the contrary, though many treatises on the subject were extant in the time of Tully,-particularly those written by Agatharcus, Anaxagoras, Heliodorus, and Germinus of Rhodes, the Roman artists had made such little comparative progress, that their landscapes were greatly inferior to their portrait and historical designs. Perspective, however, was consulted in the coins of Tarsus: Quintilian says, that Zeuxis understood light and shade; and Pliny mentions various subjects, which it would have been impossible to have delineated, had the ancient painters been so entirely ignorant of lineal and aërial perspective, as some writers suppose a.

La Chausse, speaking of the perspective of the Thermæ of Titus, says, "Da questa pittura si cognosce che gli Antichi sono stati alfretanto infelici nella prospettiva, ch' eruditi nel disegno."-Pittur. Antich. p. 13. Several pictures, found at Herculaneum, place the knowledge of Roman artists in the science of perspective beyond a doubt. The curious reader may, however, consult with advantage Kircher's Ars magna Lucis et Umbræ. Rom. 1646, fol.

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LOTEN painted in England and in Switzerland: and his genius led to the delineation of storms and waterfalls. BREUGHEL studied his art among the mountains of the Tyrol: yet caprice attached him, principally, to the exhibition of the humorous and grotesque. His son, however, was so great a master in his art, that Rubens condescended to employ him, in touching his celebrated picture of the Terrestrial Paradise. RUBENS excelled in the picturesque ; but of his character, as a landscape painter, it is dangerous to say too much, and invidious to say too little. His merits have been overvalued by some, and underrated by others; according to the respective tastes and prejudices of his critics. He was, beyond all question, the most eminent of the Flemish school; and yet Algarotti is not wide of the truth, when he observes, that his compositions are not so rich, nor his touches so light, as those of Paul Veronese. Though more soft in his chiaro-oscuro than Caravaggio, he has less delicacy than Vandyke; and though more dazzling, yet has he less simplicity of design, and less truth and harmony of colouring, than Titian.

This artist was the favourite painter of the first Duke of Marlborough; who had eighteen of his best pieces. His largest picture exhibits a bird's eye view of an extensive country, which Walpole considers as containing in itself a perfect school for painters of landscape. It would form a pleasure of no common order, to compare his picture of the Deluge with that by Antoine Carrache; and both with the descriptions of Milton. Compared with Poussin, Rubens had a decided advantage; and their two pictures of the Deluge afford favourable occasions for comparison. He had a bold style of pencilling, peculiarly striking. He electrifies by his brilliancy; by the violence of his bursts; and by that pow

a The works of M. Angelo, Raphael, &c., appear to me to have nothing of the picturesque; whereas Rubens and the Venetian painters may almost be said to have nothing else.-Sir Joshua Reynolds, in a letter to Mr. Gilpin, April 19, 1791.

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