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thoughtful sentiment. The consistency of the expression constitutes as great a charm in Titian's portraits as the harmony of the colouring. The similarity sometimes objected to his heads is partly national and partly arises from the class of persons whom he painted. painted only Italians; and in his time it rarely happened that any but persons of the highest rank, senators or cardinals, sat for their pictures. The similarity of costume, of the dress, the beard, &c. also adds to the similarity of their appearance. It adds, at the same time, to their picturesque effect; and the alteration in this respect is one circumstance, among others, that has been injurious, not to say fatal to modern art. This observation is not confined to portrait; for the hired dresses with which our historical painters clothe their figures sit no more easily on the imagination of the artist than they do gracefully on the lay-figures over which they are thrown.

Giorgioni, Paul Veronese, Tintoret, and the Bassans are the remaining great names of the Venetian school. The excellence of all of these consisted in their bold, masterly, and striking imitation of nature. Their want of ideal form and elevated character is indeed a constant subject of reproach against them. Giorgioni

takes the first place among them; for he was in some measure the master of Titian; whereas the others were only his disciples. The Caraccis, Domenichino, and the rest of the Bolognese school formed themselves on a principle of combining the excellences of the Roman and Venetian painters, in which they for a while succeeded to a considerable degree; but they degenerated and dwindled away into absolute insignificance in proportion as they departed from nature or the great masters who had copied her, to mould their works on academic rules and the phantoms of abstract perfection.

Rubens is the prince of the Flemish painters. Of all the great painters he is perhaps the most artificial: the man who painted most from his imagination, and, what was almost the inevitable consequence, the most of a mannerist. He had neither the Greek form to study from, nor the Roman expression, nor the high character, picturesque costume, and sun-burnt hues which the Venetian painters had immediately before them. He took, however, what circumstance presented to him, a fresher and more blooming tone of complexion, arising from moister air and a colder climate. To this he added the congenial splendour of reflected lights and shadows, cast from rich drapery; and he

made what amends he could for the want of expression by the richness of his compositions and the fantastic variety of his allegorical groups. Both his colouring and his drawing were, however, ideal exaggerations; but both had particular qualities of the highest value. He has given to his flesh greater transparency and freshness than any other painter; and this excellence he had from nature. One of the finest instances will be found in his Peasant Family going to Market, in which the figures have all the bloom of health upon their countenances; and the very air of the surrounding landscape strikes sharp and wholesome on the sense. Rubens had another excellence: he has given all that relates to the expression of motion, in his allegorical figures, in his children, his animals, even in his trees, to a degree which no one else has equalled, or indeed approached. His drawing is often deficient in proportion, in knowledge, and in elegance, but it is always picturesque. The drawing of N. Poussin, on the contrary, which has been much cried up, is merely learned and anatomical: he has a knowledge of the structure and measurements of the human body, but very little feeling of the grand, or beautiful, or striking in form.

All Rubens' forms have ease, freedom, and

excessive elasticity. In the grotesque style of history, as in groups of satyrs, nymphs, bacchanals, and animals, where striking contrasts of form are combined with every kind of rapid and irregular movement, he has not a rival. Witness his Silenus at Blenheim, where the lines seem drunk and staggering; and his Procession of Cupids riding on Animals at Whitehall, with that adventurous leader of the infantine crew, who, with a spear is urging a lion, on which he is mounted, over the edge of the world; for beyond we only see a precipice of clouds and sky. Rubens' power of expressing motion, perhaps, arose from the facility of his pencil, and his habitually trusting a good deal to memory and imagination in his compositions; for this quality can be given in no other way. His portraits are the least valuable productions of his pencil. His landscapes are often delightful, and appear like the work of fairy hands.

It remains to speak of Vandyke and Rembrandt; the one the disciple of Rubens, the other the entire founder of his own school. It is not possible for two painters to be more opposite. The characteristic merits of the former are very happily summed up in a single line of a poetical critic, where he speaks of

"The soft precision of the clear Vandyke."

The general object of this analysis of the works of the great masters has been to show that their pre-eminence has constantly depended, not on the creation of a fantastic, abstract excellence, existing nowhere but in their own mind, but in their selecting and embodying some one view of nature, which came immediately under their habitual observation, and which their particular genius led them to study and imitate with success. This is certainly the case with Vandyke. His portraits, mostly of English women, in the collection in the Louvre, have a cool, refreshing air about them, a look of simplicity and modesty even in the very tone, which forms a fine contrast to the voluptuous glow and mellow golden lustre of Titian's Italian women. There is a quality of flesh-colour in Vandyke which is to be found in no other painter, and which exactly conveys the idea of the soft, smooth, sliding, continuous, delicately varied surface of the skin. The objects in his pictures have the least possible difference of light and shade, and are presented to the eye without passing through any indirect medium. It is this extreme purity and silvery clearness of tone, together with the facility and precision of his particular forms,