faithful imitation of pleasing nature. I know little of the masters; care nothing for the schools; and disdain to learn by rote the technical babble about gusto, chiaro oscuro, handling, tints and half tints, orpiments, pigments, lucid and opaque, carnations, Spanish brown, Venetian red, and Naples yellow : but having a practised eye, and a fervent feeling for the great original, as executed by the hand of the Creator, I consider myself competent, without other apprenticeship, to form an opinion of any copy modified by the pencil of man. I need not put my eye to school to enable it to judge of resemblances; nor make my heart member of an academy, that it may learn responses to the whisperings of external beauty. Perhaps the critics think otherwise, but they may be very positive and yet very wrong. Inthe infancy of painting, the artists contented themselves with a simple imitation of nature, and he was the best performer who could produce the cleverest deception. It was reckoned a great triumph when Bucephalus neighed at Alexander's portrait; Zeuxis snapped his fingers at Parrhasius when the birds came to peck at his painted grapes, but confessed himself outdone, when, on offering to remove a curtain that apparently covered a portion of his rival's canvass, he discovered it to be the production of his brush. In the progress of professional ambition, such easy victories are disdained; difficulties are overcome which were before considered insuperable; foreshortening, perspective, composition, light and shade, are scientifically combined; and while nature assumes no position in which she cannot be faithfully reflected, her imitators select none in which she cannot be pleasingly, as well as accurately, represented. The arts have their decline and fall as well as empires; and painting, from this epoch, begins to feel the touches of corruption, until the conquest of technical difficulties is deemed the paramount excellence: subjects are selected, not sparkling black eye decoys your attention from his dilapidated mouth and plain features, as it catches with keen enjoyment the beauties of art, and points them out to others with not less eagerness than it discovers them! That is Denon, the Egyptian traveller, now in his eighty-fifth year, whose whole exterior indicates the savant so much more than the soldier, that one is astonished how he could so far have combined the two, as to gallop round the ruins of the great temple at Luxor in an hour. Accompanied by these personages, and others of less celebrity, we walked through the sumptuous apartments, all decorated in the most costly and elegant manner, although the gold leaf, as usual in this country, had been spread over the cornices, and doors, and ceilings, with somewhat of gilt-gingerbread prodigality. In the last room but one we encountered the state bed, of blue embroidered satin, with rich gold fringe and decorations, the bedstead emblazoned with gorgeous military trophies and devices; the dogs of the fire places formed so as to represent handsome brass mortars; the walls painted with martial symbols, and every thing in the same warlike consistency, except a white marble console, on which stood a bust of Louis the Eighteenth! This incongruity seemed to impart its puzzling contradiction to my own thoughts. ble to account for the presence of this royal personage either in the copy or the original, I threw back my mind a few years, and found it still more incredible that I myself should be where I then was, courteously received by personages who were figuring in our papers as implacable and eternal enemies -and gazing upon alter-pieces which were then hallowed by the "dim religious light" of Spanish cathedrals, or only uncurtained that they might receive the adoration of kneeling nuns, while sacred music and symphonious hymns floated around them. The past and the present refused to amalgamate in Una my reveries-all seemed a waking dream-a solecism of fact-a practical impossibility--an anomalous jumble both of time and place. Roused from this abstraction by the admiration expressed at Murillo's large painting of the Nativity, I proceeded to examine it. Having scarcely any thing in England but the Cottage Girls, Gipsy Boys, and other juvenile polissons of this artist, one is prepossessed with the idea that he could not elevate himself to the poetry of painting and the sublime of Scriptural illustration; but if this single picture be not sufficient to remove so erroneous an impression, let the spectator contemplate the Return of the Prodigal Son, by its side, and their combined effect will banish all his scepticism. In that of Our Saviour at the Pool of Bethesda, the hand of Christ is conceived to have realised that almost unattainable perfection-a happy union of the divine and human expression; while the Angel appearing to St. Peter in his Prison, does not lose the celestial beauty, in the look of sympathising earnestness with which he is addressing the Saint. Almost all the paintings are of large dimensions, and in excellent preservation; and not one can be scrutinised without a conviction that Murillo's great teacher was Nature. The Fairs and Markets of his master, Juan del Castillio, were too ignoble for his ambition; he was too poor to go to Italy; and though he had access at Madrid to some of the works of Rubens and Vandyck, he was content with neither a pulpy Venus, nor a full-ruffed portrait, but betook himself to the study of the great Goddess. Exhibiting none of that mannerism, self-display, and pedantry, to which I alluded in the outset, he blends every thing harmoniously and naturally; and remembering that the object of his art is to please, he lends himself to the expression of amiable and tender sentiments with a felicity in which no artist has exceeded him. Let any unprejudiced person proceed from the annual exposition of the gaudy and theatrical French school at the Louvre to Marshal Soult's gallery of Murillos, and he will at once recognise the superiority of native untutored genius over the imitative pedantic efforts of institutions, schools, and academies. THE CIVIC DINNER. THE guests assembled in Budge-row, But all together stuff and chatter, Like gluttons playing at cross-questions. What 's that on Mrs, Firkin's head? Roast hare and sweet sauce-wears a wig- What has she got? a roasted pig. A rein-deer tongue-begins to chatter. How well he carves! he 's named by will Say NOBLET's coming to fulfil— Some mint-sauce, and a few more capers. But BIRCH is surely best for whips. Nice chickens-Mrs. Fry must carry- Knows all his letters down to izzard. A famous buttock-vermicelli, Black puddings-pepper'd-dish'd--Belzoni; She's a most loving wife-mock-turtle. Some kissing crust-and off they go. I eat for lunch--a handkerchief-- And we both roll'd in-lobster sauce. The Princess Olive-mushroom ketchup-- Poor Miss-red herring-we must give her So Fanny Flirt is going to marry A nice Welsh-rabbit-muffins-mummery Grimaldi-ices-Captain Parry Crimp'd cod-crim-con-Crim Tartars-flummery. A RIDE IN A CUCKOO. "Why, what a rascal art thou, then, to praise him so for run-ning!— A horseback, ye Cuckoo; but afoot he will not budge a foot!" SHAKSPEARE. SIGHT-SEEING in hot weather is rather an awful enterprise: going over palaces is the most objectionable form of this painful pleasure; and the Château of Versailles, from its immense extent and total want of furniture, is perhaps the most wearisome of all these edifices to wade through. Others look like habitations: to a certain extent, they let us into the arcana of royalty's domestic life, and so possess some interest, as well as dignity of association; but here all is bare and empty: however fatigued the visitant may be, there is not a single |