trifling sum. No glory is around the head of the Mother, nor is it needed: but the soul of the painter sheds its influence over it like a dove, and the spirit of love, sanctity, beauty, breathes from the divine group. There are four Raphaels (Holy Families) in this collection, two others by the side of this in his early more precise and affected manner, somewhat faded, and a small one of the Virgin, Sleeping Jesus, and St. John, in his finest manner. There is, or there was, a duplicate of this picture (of which the engraving is also common) in the Louvre, which was certainly superior to the one at the Marquis of Stafford's. The colouring of the drapery in that too was cold, and the face of the Virgin thin and poor; but never was infancy laid asleep more calmly, more sweetly, more soundly, than in the figure of Our Saviour-the little pouting mouth seemed to drink balmy, innocent sleep-and the rude expression of wonder and delight in the more robust, sun-burnt, fur-clad figure of St. John was as spirited in itself as it was striking, when contrasted with the meeker beauties of the figure opposed to it.-From these we turn to the FOUR AGES, by Titian, or Giorgione, as some say. Strange that there should have lived two men in the same age, on the same spot of earth, with respect to whom it should bear a question-which of them painted such a picture! Barry, we remember, and Collins, the miniature-painter, thought it a Giorgione, and they were considered two of the best judges going, at the time this picture was exhibited, among others, in the Orleans Gallery. We cannot pretend to decide on such nice matters ex cathedra; but no painter need be ashamed to own it. The gradations of human life are marked with characteristic felicity, and the landscape, which is thrown in, adds a pastoral charm and naïveté to the whole. To live or to die in such a chosen, still retreat must be happy! Certainly, this composition suggests a beautiful moral lesson; and as to the painting of the group of children in the corner, we suppose, for careless freedom of pencil, and a certain milky softness of the flesh, it can scarcely be paralleled. Over the three Raphaels is a Danaë, by Annibal Caracci,

which we used to adore where it was hung on high in the Orleans Gallery. The face is fine, up-turned, expectant; and the figure no less fine, desirable, ample, worthy of a God. The golden shower is just seen de scending; the landscape at a distance has (so fancy might interpret) a cold, shuddering aspect. There is another very fine picture of the same hand close by, St. Gregory with Angels. It is difficult to know which to admire most, the resigned and yet earnest expression of the Saint, or the elegant forms, the graceful attitudes, and bland, cordial, benignant faces of the attendant angels. The artist in these last has evidently had an eye to Correggio, both in the waving outline, and in the charm of the expression; and he has succeeded admirably, but not entirely. Something of the extreme unction of Correggio is wanting. The drawing of Annibal's Angels is, perhaps, too firm, too sinewy, too masculine. In Correggio, the Angel's spirit seemed to be united to a human body, to imbue, mould, penetrate every part with its sweetness and softness: in Caracci, you would say that a heavenly spirit inhabited, looked out of, moved a goodly human frame,

And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay.

The composition of this picture is rather forced (it was one of those made to order for the monks) and the colour is somewhat metallic; but it has, notwithstanding, on the whole, a striking and tolerably harmonious effect. There is still another picture by Caracci (also an old favourite with us, for it was in the Orleans set) Diana and Nymphs bathing, with the story of Calisto. It is one of his very best, with something of the drawing of the antique and the landscape-colouring of Titian. The figures are all heroic, handsome, such as might belong to huntresses, or Goddesses: and the coolness and seclusion of the scene, under grey overhanging cliffs, and brown o'ershadowing trees, with all the richness and truth of nature, have the effect of an enchanting reality. The story and figures are more classical and better managed than those of the Diana and Calisto by Titian; but there is a charm in that picture and the fellow to it, the Diana and Actaon, (there is no other.

fellow to it in the world!) which no words can convey. It is the charm thrown over each by the greatest genius for colouring that the world ever saw. It is hard, nay, impossible to say which is the finest in this respect but either one or the other (whichever we turn to, and we can never be satisfied with looking at either so rich a scene do they unfold, so serene a harmony do they infuse into the soul) is like a divine piece of music, or rises "like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumes." In the figures, in the landscape, in the water, in the sky, there are tones, colours, scattered with a profuse and unerring hand, gorgeous, but most true, dazzling with their force, but blended, softened, woven together into a woof like that of Iris-tints of flesh colour, as if you saw the blood circling beneath the pearly skin; clouds empurpled with setting suns; hills steeped in azure skies; trees turning to a mellow brown; the cold grey rocks, and the water so translucent, that you see the shadows and the snowy feet of the naked nymphs in it. With all this prodigality of genius, there is the greatest severity and discipline of art. The figures seem grouped for the effect of colour -the most startling contrasts are struck out, and then a third object, a piece of drapery, an uplifted arm, a bow and arrows, a straggling weed, is introduced to make an intermediate tint, or carry on the harmony. Every colour is melted, impasted into every other, with fine keeping and bold diversity. Look at that indignant, queen-like figure of Diana (more perhaps like an offended mortal princess, than an immortal Goddess, though the immortals could frown and give themselves strange airs), and see the snowy, ermine-like skin; the pale clear shadows of the delicately formed back; then the brown colour of the slender trees behind to set off the shaded flesh and last, the dark figure of the Ethiopian girl behind, completing the gradation. Then the bright scarf suspended in the air connects itself with the glowing clouds, and deepens the solemn azure of the sky: Actæon's bow

and arrows fallen on the ground are also red; and there is a little scarlet flower on the brink of the Bath which catches and pleases the eye, saturated with this colour. The yellowish grey of the earth also relieves the low tone of the figures, where they are in half-shadow; and this again is enlivened by the leaden fountain of the Bath, which is set off or kept down in its proper place by the blue vestments strown near it. The figure of Acteon is spirited and natural; it is that of a bold rough hunter in the early ages, struck with surprise, abashed with beauty. The forms of some of the female figures are elegant enough, particularly that of Diana in the story of Calisto; and there is a very pretty faced girl mischievously dragging the culprit forward; but it is the texture of the flesh that is throughout delicious, unrivalled, surpassingly fair. The landscape canopies the scene, with a sort of proud, unmindful consciousness. The trees nod to it, and the hills roll in a sea of colour. Every where colour, not form, predominates-there is not a line in the picture-but a gusto, a rich taste of colour is left upon the eye, as if it were the palate, and the diapason of picturesque harmony is full to overflowing. "Oh Titian and Nature! which of you copied the other?"

We are ashamed of this description now we have made it, and heartily wish somebody would make a better. There is another Titian here (which was also in the Orleans Gallery),* Venus rising from the Sea. The figure and face are elegantly designed and sweetly expressed :whether it is the picture of the Goddess of Love, may admit of a question; that it is the picture of a lovely woman in a lovely attitude, admits of none. The half-shadow in which most of it is painted, is a kind of veil through which the delicate skin shows more transparent and aerial. There is nothing in the picture but this single exquisitely turned figure, and if it were continued downward to a whole-length, it would seem like a copy of a statue of the Goddess carved in ivory or marble; but being only a half-length, it has not this

effect at all, but looks like an enchant ing study, or a part of a larger composition, selected à l'envie. The hair, and the arm holding it up, are nearly the same as in the well-known picture of Titian's Mistress, and are delicious. The back-ground is beautifully painted. We said before, that there was no object in the picture but the Venus. Nay, there is the sea, and a sea-shell, but these might be given in sculpture. Under the Under the Venus, is a portrait by Vandyke, of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, a most gentleman-like performance, mild, clear, intelligent, unassuming; and on the right of the spectator, a Madonna, by Guido, with the icy glow of sanctity upon it; and to the left, the fable of Salmacis, by Albano (saving the ambiguity of the subject), an exquisite picture. Four finer specimens of the art can scarcely be found again in so small a compass. There is in another room a portrait, said to be by Moroni, and called TITIAN'S SCHOOL-MASTER, from a vague tradition, that he was in the habit of frequently visiting, in order to study and learn from it. If so, he must have profited by his assiduity; for it looks as if he had painted it. Not knowing any thing of this Moroni, if we had been asked who had done it, we should have replied, "Either Titian or the Devil."* It is, indeed, more laboured and minute than Titian; but the only objection at all staggering is, that it has less of the devil in it than is ordinarily to be found in his pictures. Look at the portrait above it, for instanceClement VII. by the great Venetian; and you find the eye looking at you again, as if it had been observing you all the time: but the eye in Titian's Schoolmaster is an eye to look at, not to look with, or if it looks at you, it does not look through you, which may be almost made a test of Titian's heads. There is not the spirit, the intelligence within, moulding the expression, and giving it intensity of purpose and decision of character. In every other respect but this (and perhaps a certain want of breadth) it is as good as Titian. There is (we understand) a half-length of Clement

VII. by Julio Romano, in the Papal Palace at Rome, in which he is represented as seated above the spectator, with the head elevated and the eye looking down like a camel's, with an amazing dignity of aspect. The picture (Mr. Northcote says) is hard and ill-coloured, but, in strength of character and conception, superior to the Titian at the Marquis of Stafford's. Titian, undoubtedly, put a good deal of his own character into his portraits. He was not himself filled with the "milk of human kindness." He got his brother, who promised to rival him in his own art, and of whom he was jealous, sent on a foreign embassy; and he so frightened Pordenone while he was painting an altar-piece for a church, that he worked with his colours in one hand, and a sword by his side.

We meet with one or two admirable portraits, by Tintoretto, particularly No. 112, which is of a fine fleshy tone, and A Doge of Venice, by Palma Vecchio, stamped with an expressive look of official or assumed dignity. There is a Bassan, No. 95, The Circumcision, the colours of which are somewhat dingy, and sunk into the canvas; but as the sun shone upon it while we were looking at it, it glittered all green and gold. Bassan's execution is as fine as possible, and his colouring has a most harmonious monotony. We must not forget the Mu leteers, supposed to be by Correggio, in which the figure of the mule seems actually passing across the picture (you hear his bells); nor the little copy of his Marriage of St. Catherine, by L. Caracci, which is all over grace, delicacy, and sweetness. Any one may judge of his progress in a taste for the refinements of art, by his liking for this picture. Indeed, Correggio is the very essence of refinement. Among other pictures in the Italian division of the gallery, we would point out the Claudes (particularly Nos. 43 and 50, which, though inferior to Mr. Angerstein's as compositions, preserve more of the delicacy of execution, or what Barry used to call "the fine oleaginous touches of Claude"), two small Gaspar

bump on every head among us that is out of its first cap. Observe the dispositions and habits of children and savages, or of any people in whom inclination has not been adulterated by the artifices of law. How unaffected, how guileless is their knavery! It sits upon them not as an acquired sin, but as a piece of natural freedom, a fine generous error of the original heart. The South Sea islanders, with their pretty primitive tricks, have been shockingly used by their various visitors. They have always been reported to be thieves, in our European sense of that opprobrious title, and treated accordingly. Poor honest rogues not of their own making, I pity them heartily! It is true, they would become proprietors of a hatchet, or a ten-penny nail, let it belong to whom it might; and what then? The true thieves, it has always appeared to me, were those who had the heart to make them restore what it so suited them to call their own. I could as soon have reclaimed an apple that a baby had stolen from my pocket, as have defrauded one of these simple creatures of any thing that it had pleased him in his liberality to take from me. Homo sum, nihil humani a me ALIENUM puto-in other words, my brethren of Owhyhee should have picked my pockets, and welcome.

How nearly allied are covetousness and dishonesty!- and are we not all covetous? We are alive, at least, to the great directing impulse of the robber, however we may have learn ed, on prudential considerations, to moderate its action. We refrain, I grant; but our mouths water,-and that is not to be innocent. The mala mens-the desire-the diagnostic bump, are not to be removed.Thieving is a hard word, a low phrase for general application; let us call it the disposition to humour our wants, the longing to appropriate whatever presents itself to our tastes and fancies as agreeable or convenient. We are not all thieves, in the vulgar sense of the term-far from it. A thief is not a man who has a love of taking to himself whatsoever pleases him, but one who will take, in contempt of all consequences. He is insensible to infamy, and therein differs from us all,-not in that he is

honest. But how should there be

infamy connected with offences to which we have all an eager, if not an equal, proclivity? There is a sort of conventional shame that protects our possessions, not the shame of dishonesty, but the shame of the gallows. In the absence of any provision in our moral sense, it was necessary, for the security of property, to set up a prejudice against being hanged. The desire of keeping, coeval and conspiring with the desire of getting, made it suitable, upon the whole, that laws should be appointed for restraining the licentiousness of the general hand. Avarice, with whatever pain, has politic reasons for checking the ardour of its great provider, Covetousness.Such artificial checks, however, can be regarded only in the light of commercial regulations, of effectual service to the morality of the shops, but without much influence upon that of our minds. We have no instinctive horror of dishonesty in our nature, as we have of many other crimes. We have no sense of naked and intrinsic deformity in it, and therefore dress it up in frightful clothing-black its face, and then call it a monster. It is no true fiend, but "a painted devil," which we permit, by a species of collusion, to call the blushes to our cheeks, and make our hearts quake within us. The judge-the bar-the rope-these are the dread supplements which constitute its sin and shame. A man would bear to hear any thing of an ancestor but that he had been hanged. Were a nobleman to be convicted of "stealing to the amount of forty shillings," we should despise him, not for the enormity of his crime, but for the stigma of its punishment. That he should no longer be an honest man we could bear; but he is no longer a gentleman-and we close our hearts against him for ever. We give ourselves airs, because we feel that we could not have exposed ourselves to such a penalty, and so call ourselves honest. We are respecters of the law, not honest. A rogue (if such names must be) who secures a good prize from the pocket of another, is a "lucky dog;" we hear of his success, and wink, and look sly and sympathetic at one another: take the wretch to Bow-street, and you make