and a certain air of fashionable elegance, characteristic of the age in which he flourished, that places Vandyke in the first rank of portrait-painters.

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If ever there was a man of genius in the art, it was Rembrandt. He might be said to have created a medium of his own, through which he saw all objects. He was the grossest and the least vulgar, that is to say, the least common-place in his grossness, of all men. He was the most downright, the least fastidious of the imitators of nature. He took any object, he cared not what, how mean soever in form, colour, and expression; and from the light and shade which he threw upon it, it came out gorgeous from his hands. As Vandyke made use of the smallest contrasts of light and shade, and painted as if in the open air, Rembrandt used the most violent and abrupt contrasts in this respect, and painted his objects as if in a dungeon. His pictures may be said to be bright with excessive darkness." His vision had acquired a lynx-eyed sharpness from the artificial obscurity to which he had accustomed himself. 66 Mystery and silence hung upon his pencil." Yet he could pass rapidly from one extreme to another, and dip his colours with equal success in the gloom of night or in the

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blaze of the noon-day sun. In surrounding different objects with a medium of imagination, solemn or dazzling, he was a true poet; in all the rest he was a mere painter, but a painter of no common stamp. The powers of his hand were equal to those of his eye; and, indeed, he could not have attempted the subjects he did, without an execution as masterly as his knowledge was profound. His colours are sometimes dropped in lumps on the canvass ; at other times they are laid on as smooth as glass; and he not unfrequently painted with the handle of his brush. He had an eye for all objects as far as he had seen them. His history and landscapes are equally fine in their way. His landscapes one could look at for ever, though there is nothing in them. But

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they are of the earth, earthy." It seems as if he had dug them out of nature. Everything is so true, so real, so full of all the feelings and associations which the eye can suggest to the other senses, that we immediately take as strong an affection to them as if they were our homethe very place where we were brought up. No length of time could add to the intensity of the impressions they convey. Rembrandt is

the least classical and the most romantic of all painters. His Jacob's Ladder is more like a

dream than any other picture that ever was painted. The figure of Jacob himself is thrown in one corner of the picture like a bundle of clothes, while the angels hover above the darkness in the shape of airy wings.

It would be needless to prove that the generality of the Dutch painters copied from actual objects. They have become almost a bye-word for carrying this principle into its abuse, by copying everything they saw, and having no choice or preference of one thing to another, unless that they preferred that which was most obvious and common. I forgive them. They perhaps did better in faithfully and skilfully imitating what they had seen, than in imagining what they had not seen. Their pictures, at least, show that there is nothing in nature, however mean or trivial, that has not its beauty, and some interest belonging to it, if truly represented. I prefer Vangoyen's views on the borders of a canal, the yellow-tufted bank and passing sail, or Ruysdael's woods and sparkling waterfalls, to the most classical or epic compositions which could have been invented out of nothing; and I think that Teniers's boors, old women, and children, are very superior to the little carved ivory Venuses in the pictures of Vanderneer; just as I think Hogarth's Mar

riage à la Mode is better than his Sigismunda, or as Mr Wilkie's Card-Players is better than his Alfred. I should not assuredly prefer a Dutch Fair by Teniers to a Cartoon by Raphael; but I suspect I should prefer a Dutch Fair by Teniers to a Cartoon by the same master; or, I should prefer truth and nature in the simplest dress, to affectation and inanity in the most pompous disguise. Whatever is genuine in art must proceed from the impulse of nature and individual genius.

In the French school there are but two names of high and established reputation--N. Poussin and Claude Lorraine. Of the former I have already spoken; of the latter I shall give my opinion when I come to speak of our own Wilson. I ought not to pass over the names of Murillo and Velasquez, those admirable Spanish painters. It is difficult to characterize their peculiar excellences as distinct from those of the Italian and Dutch schools. They may be said to hold a middle rank between the painters of mind and body. They express not so much thought and sentiment, nor yet the mere exterior, as the life and spirit of the man. Murillo is probably at the head of that class of painters who have treated subjects of common life. After making the colours on the canvass feel and

think, the next best thing is to make them breathe and live. But there is in Murillo's pictures of this kind a look of real life, a cordial flow of native animal spirits, which we find no where else. I might here refer particularly to his picture of the Two Spanish Beggar Boys, in the collection at Dulwich College, which cannot easily be forgotten by those who have ever seen it.

I come now to treat of the progress of art in Britain.

I shall first speak of Hogarth, both as he is the first name in the order of time that we have to boast of, and as he is the greatest comic painter of any age or country. His pictures are not imitations of still life, or mere transcripts of incidental scenes or customs; but powerful moral satires, exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view, and, with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners, in all their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts. There is not a single picture of his containing a representation of merely natural or domestic scenery. His object is not so much "to hold the mirror up to nature," as "to show vice her own feature, scorn her own image." Folly is there seen at the height-the moon is at the full-it is the