But when the subject is the loveliest of arts, Painting-embracing as it does the beautiful, the great, and the pathetic, whatever charms the eye and moves the heart-we are sensible of more than common pleasure, and become soothed into dreams and visions of our own, even by the gentle garrulity of a connoisseur. Is there any one who pretends to acquaintance with literature, however uninitiated he may be in the mysteries of the arts, who has not read the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and who has not wished, after reading them, to be enabled to say, "anche io son pittore?" When we are told of picture galleries with their thousand works of art, and are warmed by the descriptions, feeble though they must be, of many of them, we seem to be suddenly led by a lamp of more magical power than Aladdin's; for what was his gallery of fruit-trees bearing precious stones, to a gallery rich in pictures, the still brighter fruits of genius, presenting endless variety, each one almost a world in itself, and all, enticing the imagination into regions unbounded, of charm and loveliness, suggested, though not made visible, but to the mind's eye? We remember in our school days giving Virgil credit for much tact in endeavouring to make a gentleman of Æneas, and succeeding too for a while in raising the more than equivocal character of his hero, by placing him in the picture-gallery of the Queen of Carthage, and giving him leisure to contemplate and to criticise, and poetically to describe to his silent and spiritless lounger-friend many noble and many touching works. In this passage we also obtain the

great Latin poet's opinion of the ameliorating effect of "collections." The hero of the Æneid knew immediately he was among an amiable people. The picture-gallery was the "nova res oblata" which "timorem leniit ""Hic primum Æneas sperare salutem Ausus, et afflictis melius confidere rebus; Namque"

It is singular that all the courts of Europe liave, for more than two centuries, been earnestly engaged in forming public galleries, a national benefit and honour which England had neglected with her great wealth, and with opportunities singularly favourable, until within a few years; and even now we are making but very slow progress, and works of art of the olden and golden time are becoming more rare, and immensely rising in value. Had we, as a nation, collected even fifty years ago-speaking of the transactions as a money speculation, in which view, according to the taste of the day, we must look at every thing -our purchases would now have been worth treble the first cost in money. The unhappy fate of Charles I. was most adverse to the arts here. It not only scattered the collection made by him, but, by the triumph of Puritanism, plunged the country first into a dislike of, and, for long subsequent periods, into an indifference for art. We even doubt if this gross feeling has altogether subsided. We do not yet take a national pride in works of genius, unless they immediately bear upon the art of living. No country is so rich as ours in private, and none so poor in public collections. And if we progress so slowly in our National Gallery, we can scarcely wonder that public institutions of the kind have not been dreamed of in the provinces. We sincerely hope that the movement Mr Ewart is making will be crowned with success, and that in time "collections" in our cities and towns will be the result.

The Musée of Paris, in 1844, contained upwards of fifteen hundred pictures. According to the catalogue compiled in 1781, the Imperial Gallery

of Vienna then contained twelve hundred and thirty-four. According to the catalogue of 1839, the Dresden gallery contained eighteen hundred and fifty-seven. At Munich, the present king has erected a spacious building, into which he has draughted a selection, from among several thousands, of about fifteen hundred. And what have we done to improve the national taste? And strange, indeed, does it appear, that whenever such a subject is brought before the public mind in Parliament, it is solely with a view to the connexion of art with manufactures. There must be in the nature of things a certain connexion; but unnecessarily to bind them in union is to bind them unnaturally, and to put the shackles upon the higher, which cannot bear them without degradation. We hail with great pleasure every publication whose object is to promote a love for the fine arts; and more particularly those which show a due reverence for the old masters; for, however unwilling we may be to limit the power of genius, no one who has any pretensions to taste, and is of a cultivated mind, will deny that, if their works are not perfection, they are at least in a right direction. The novelties which more modern art has sought will pass away, we are persuaded, as not founded upon true principles, and we shall best advance by properly appreciating what has been done before us. will not here enter into the subject of the décadence of art, nor its causes. We believe that if adequate national and provincial galleries were formed, more especially at our universities, the improved public taste would create a demand which this country would not lack genius to supply. We are not in the exact condition of Italy at the sudden rise of art there. The public, in the days of Raffaelle and Michael Angelo, had nothing, or but little to unlearn; the previous aim had fortunately not been very multifarious; the sentiment of art was right, and the direction true. It remained only to enlarge the sphere; the principles were in being; they required but confirmation. Grace and power naturally arose ; for there was no counteracting education, nothing positively bad altogether to lay aside, though there was some

We

thing to correct. Now with us, on the contrary, art has run into very strange vagaries; the enlargement of the boundaries has been unlimited, but it has been in regions far below the Parnassian Mount. We have talked of the High Ideal, and practised and encouraged ad infinitum the Low Natural, and too often have descended to the worse, the Low Unnatural; so that, upon the whole, we have to unlearn very much before we can be said to be in the rudiments of Real Art. Let us suppose one born with every natural endowment, with imagination, and a power of imitation. The mind, after all, is fed with realities; there is in it also a process of digestion, which converts the real into the imaginative. Now, in early years, how rare it is that the naturally endowed artist is not ill fed— unhealthy diet of the mind entices him every where. If in the country, he is sparingly fed-sees little or nothing of Art, little perhaps beyond the Sign of an Inn-and is scarcely, from other sources of education, taught to look with the mind's eye, through the undignified appearance, to the actual dignity even of the nature he sees; if he has lived in the city, the Print-shops are inevitable lures to cheat him by little and little out of his natural taste, if there be one; for at first it can be but a mere germ. The works of greatness, of goodness, will be the last things that he will see; for seldom indeed will they be presented to his sight. For the pure, the sweet, the graceful, the dignified, he will have thrust before his eyes gaudy, tawdry caricature and grimace; and, worse still, perhaps wholly vulgar obscenities. Were he in his boyhood given a present in the pictorial line, it would be of an Operadancer or a race-course, or an abomination of London low life. What "slang" is to the ear, so would it be to the eye; and such is in nine cases out of ten the first education of those aspirants in art, who, ere they have unlearned any thing, set up for themselves and abuse the old masters. Generally speaking, they are brought up in an anti-ideal school; the powers, therefore, that nature has given them, are not only uncultivated, but led astray; and similar education and

but there, too, is the same neglect. In our time, it was a rare thing to see a "man's" room without many engravings; and that sufficiently shows how much a school of art is wanted in those places, and what a hold they would have upon youth. But we cannot say much for the taste of the productions, that generally we will not say graced the walls. We had hoped that the Taylor bequest would have established at Oxford, not only a picture gallery, but a professorship of Painting and Sculpture. A large Building has been erected; and we have heard of an intention to remove to it some rubbish called pictures. If that threat be accomplished, we shall despair of seeing them removed to give place to better things. The majority will be satisfied with seeing walls covered, and look no further. We have heard likewise that some very valuable pictures have been offered upon very favourable terms to the university. If there be amongst any an intention of forming a gallery, we would urge them to use their best endeavours to make as soon as may be a beginning. For every succeeding year not only increases the difficulty in obtaining the concurrence of influential persons, but the annually rising value of pictures makes delay an imprudence. Besides, if a beginning were once made-were it once shown that the universities are in earnest valuable bequests might greatly promote the great object. And this is an advantage that admits not of being put off to the morrow.

similar tastes in the public, find them a market for very low, very worthless commodities. We have, in fact, a great deal to unlearn. The first step with us all, is, to unlearn. Could we see nothing bad it would not be so. That which would, at first view, be thought the greatest benefit to art, engraving, has but spread the wider the pestilence of false taste. It is from all this the earlier and greater painters were free. The evil, however, having once so spread, is not to be easily corrected. Bad taste has claimed a perpetuity of copyright. Good taste must proceed from an opposite source, and work in spite of the bad. It must come from publications, just criticisms, lives of painters,* familiar treatises on the principles of art; and more especially from national and other public galleries, to direct attention, and indeed to create a demand for those other auxiliary works. People will seek to understand and feel that which is continually put before them. Could they never see any but fine productions, they would soon have a relish for them that now is impossible; but by little and little, the sight of what is good will create a liking, and the liking will soon reach an admiration, and the unlearning process is imperceptibly going on. Corrupted as our eyes now are, we would venture to assert, that were you to offer, either in prints or originals, to boys of fourth and fifth forms at our public schools, in one hand a vile and gaudy horse and jockey, and in the other a pure and lovely picture by Raffaelle, the former would be taken. Here is a lamentable neglect in education; the ear must suffer the probing and the torture of metres and verse-making, but the eye is left unguarded, unprotected, to shift for itself, or to yield to the fascinations the first pander of evil chooses to offer. The school-boy might be improved at the universities;

We have digressed from our purpose, which was to acknowledge the pleasure we have received from the pages of M. de Burtin's work; or we should rather say, from Mr White's translation. We have been some years acquainted with the original work in French. Its value in its present form is not lessened by the number of years that have passed between

the original French edition and the translation; for general remarks on art are of all times, and there is much in the particular information the volume contains, such as lists of prices, and some other matters, from which useful comparisons may be now made.

The author very modestly, in his introduction, professes not to write "for artists nor accomplished connoisseurs;" yet to such, we believe, the volume, in its compressed form, I will be of most value. He has the honesty to confess that he has learned his connoisseurship at some costthat he has been victimized into a knowledge of art. And as this is generally the case with most collectors in the beginning, and not unfrequently in the end too, he thinks he may be of some use to others in showing"how to judge pictures well" "what is a good picture;" and not of the least value, how to use it when you have it. His qualification as teacher cannot be denied; for he has not only collected, but travelled much, visited all the important collections, and by comparing picture with picture, and style with style, he has been enabled to speak with accuracy upon the distinguishing marks of schools and masters. A universal admiration,

a love that will embrace all schools and all styles, is of very rare attainment, and perhaps hardly to be desired; for every man of any strength, of any fixed tone of character, must necessarily have a bias. And besides, one man naturally receives more powerfully impressions through form, another through colour. It is not inconsistent that a perfect connoisseur should be equally affected by both; but the mind is not allowed the same latitude with regard to subject; the passion will ever be for that which is congenial; whatever is foreign to it will receive but a cold and passing admiration. We should collect from the whole contents of this volume, that the author was never an enthusiastic admirer of what is termed high Italian art. He seldom dwells upon "the sublime and beautiful." Gifted rather with a complacent acquiescence in what is great, than stirred by it to any heat of rapture, it is probable that at least the sphere of

his pleasures was enlarged; and his nice sense of the beauty, touch, and colour, rendered pictures, of subjects of little interest, more pleasing to him, than they could be to the connoisseur of more exclusive taste. His predilection is, however, for Colour; and we agree with him, "that without the science of colouring, that so difficult science, about which the exclusive partisans of ideal beauty trouble themselves so little, their antiques and their ideal perfection may produce designs, but never can pictures."

Two definitions are laid down, which, as frequent reference is made to them, we copy. Definition of painting- "The art of applying colours, without relief, upon a plain surface, so as to imitate any object in the manner in which it is seen, or may be conceived visible in nature." "A good picture" he defines to be,

a good choice of subject well represented." If we knew precisely what is here meant by "nature," a word used by all writers on art in very various senses, and commonly very vaguely, we might not find fault with the definition; but genius, which has "Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new,"

is not too strictly to be limited to the

actualities of external nature. It is the nature of the mind, under certain impulses and impressions, to exaggerate, to combine from memory, not from sight, even to the verge of the impossible; for even this extravagance is the product of human passion, which by its nature disdains common boundaries; and this, in painting, is especially the province of Colour, which may be said to be the poetical language of art, and admits differences of the same kind as exist between common speech and poetical and figurative diction.

The painter as well as poet may colour somewhat highly,

"And breathe a browner horror o'er the woods."

Critics too often write of art as if it had only to do with what actually exists; whereas it is given to it as to poetry" to make," to create all that is required is a certain connexion with the real, sometimes exceedingly slight,