'conversation pieces' and scenes from public and private history, in which large numbers of human faces and forms are put upon the canvass, is, that there is no unity of life about them. Rare indeed are the cases in which you do not feel by instinct that each figure was separately blocked. With Wilkie's pictures it is not so. There is a homogeneity, a consent, about his pictures, which makes the moral grouping (if I may so speak) as nearly perfect as one could conceive it to be. Now, I have read enough of the life of Wilkie to know that he possessed in a high degree the power of concentration-the power of holding fleeting ideas till they can be taken up in order and put in their places-and I suspect that, though he may not have been an amiable man, he possessed the social sentiment (sympathy with life, pure and simple) in very unadulterated strength.

In the catalogue of requisites for a painter given just above, it is the seventh which, added to the preceding six, chiefly determines the function. Take away the mechanical faculty, and you have-well, that is uncertain, but you have not a painter. As a Milton may be 'mute and inglorious' from lacking 'the accomplishment of verse,' so a Raphael may be invisible and inglorious for want of the executive faculty which bears the same relation to his perceptions of the divine frame of things that skill in versification does to the poet's perception of the same. And it is a noticeable circumstance that the quality in which lies the main difference between the Painter and the Man of Letters is that in which painters are, for the most part, extremely deficient. The painter's utterance is in Colour; the poet's in Words. Now, language, the literary faculty, your painter of all men most commonly wants. The mottoes and inscriptions of artists' for their works are usually things to make merry with, and I can scarcely name such another exhibition of literary imbecility and ineptitude as the annual catalogue of the Royal Academy. I remember, when I was quite a boy, I used to marvel over it, and I do not know that it improves. Yet some high-class artists have written well, while, on the other hand, I do not remember a single man or woman whose primary vocation was literary, who has left behind enduring works on canvass or in marble. Michael Angelo wrote sonnets which have lived. Leonardo da Vinci's great work I saw at a book-stall only the other day. I cannot quote Hogarth, because he was assisted' in the composition of his book by Hoadley and Morell. Rubens did not write, but he was literary, and an accomplished linguist. I could quote Reynolds as a literary painter, only I do not believe in him. But I may not omit Blake, painter and poet-true painter and truc poet.

Of course there are painters of all ranks and classes as well as writers of all ranks and classes. But the word 'painter' is never used with that strict limitation in the mind of the user which is often applied to the word poet. Crabbe and Hogarth are very much alike. But while I could conceive a jury of critics deciding that Crabbe was not a poet at all, I could not conceive a jury of critics deciding that Hogarth was not a painter at all. We say, perhaps, Crabbe does not see things in the light that never was on sea or shore,' therefore he

is no poet, however graphically and pungently he writes in verse. But I know of no school of connoisseurs in painting who would criticise paintings with any such limitation. We speak of genre painters, and landscape painters, and historical painters, and, in general, of realist and idealist painters, but we call all who handle the brush with a certain degree of skill by the generic name. So that there is really not a parallel between the painter and the poet; it lies between the painter and the man of letters; between him whose implement is colour, and him whose implement is language. And my private and confidential opinion is, that the characteristic of the immense majority of painters, including in that expression many whom connoisseurs would excommunicate me for speaking lightly of, is, like that of men of science,

'An eye well practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor.' Creswick paints a bit of nature very sweetly, but something is wanting in him, and, in that something, everything. Two lines of Tennyson"The market-boat is on the stream,

And people hail it from the brink,'

affect me more, and show me things more vividly than Gainsborough can, and yet I heartily admire Gainsborough. When I say to myself, 'Be just; it is because you understand the implement (language) of the poet better than the implement of the painter' (colour), myself is constrained to reply,-not wholly so; for sometimes the painter can touch me more than the poet. Millais can bring very unquestionable tears into my eyes; and though I think I see pretty clearly the faults of his 'Sir Ysumbras at the Forde' this summer, I am constrained to say there is more of the light that never was on sea or shore' in that picture than in all the rest of the Academy Exhibition. It is useless to try and criticise it away; there it is; I cannot see what is not to be seen; only a certain thing can give me a certain sensation. There is Ary Scheffer again. His pictures are suffused with ideality. Distinguish between this, and incidental poetry in a picture, resulting from mere skill in imitation. A man may paint a brook well, or a tree, or a poppy in a cornfield, and so please me that my mind may put poetry into his work, but that is quite another thing.

Great allowances must be made in criticism of all kinds of painting as well as of poetry and music, for the peculiar leanings of the spectator, and, when he praises, for what he has brought with him to put into the artist's work. I have a dislike to 'Holy Families,' but they generally attract the attention of women, whose love of child-life counteracts in their minds the shock which is the natural result of attempting to paint the unpaintable. Read these

LINES ON THE CELEBRATED PICTURE BY LEONARDO DA VINCI, CALLED THE VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS.

Beholds the engaging mystic's play and pretty adoration;
Of those so low beginnings

From whence we date our winnings;

But wonders at the intent

Of those new rites, and what that strange child-worship meant.
But at her side

An angel doth abide

With such a perfect joy

As no dim doubts annoy,

An intuition,

A glory, an amenity,

Passing the dark condition

Of blind humanity,

As if he surely knew

All the blest wonders should ensue,

Or he had lately left the upper sphere,

And had read all the sovran schemes and divine riddles there.'

They are very beautiful, and will remind you of Milton's Hymn on the Nativity. I have not seen the picture, but, though, of all the old masters I think I admire Leonardo da Vinci most, I feel sure that, if I were to see it, I should not read it and find a soul-satisfying story in it as the writer of that strange poem did. It was a woman,-Charles

Lamb's sister.

In looking at nearly all pictures of such subjects as demand spiritual and poetic treatment, I suppose we find ourselves too often in the position of the clown who could not see London for the houses when he got there. We may be sure that an imaginative painter, when he has done his work, is in a similar predicament. Of all men whom I have ever known,' said the physician to Arthur Dimmesdale, 'you are he whose soul and body are most closely conjoined together. The temperament of Arthur Dimmesdale was that of the ideal artist. No man can paint a thought, but to paint thought is what real high art' is always aiming at, and the success with which the aim is taken must be in proportion to the closeness of the conjunction between 'soul and body. I have often thought it a proof of the fewness of the artists in whom there is any such conjunction that the works of the man who drew Arthur Dimmesdale, abounding as they do in wordpictures of infinite suggestion and spirituality, calling out, 'Come, put me on canvass if you can!' remain a yet unopened portfolio of treasures. I read, two years ago, of some miserable uncircumcised Dog' of a Yankee who had turned 'The Scarlet Letter' into an opera (!), but I am not sure that I have heard of a single picture from it. Yet it opens with a picture, which I have a hundred times wished to see painted by a man like Millais :

THE PRISON DOOR.

'A throng of bearded men in sad-coloured garments, and grey steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bare-headed, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The wooden jail was already marked with weather stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with bur

dock, pigweed, apple-fern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.'

I

The scene in the forest, entitled 'A Flood of Sunshine,' would make a beautiful picture in competent hands, and such hands would be those of Millais. Frank Stone might paint Phoebe gathering the roses at her bedchamber window in The House of the Seven Gables.' think Mr. Dyce would find work that would suit him in 'Drowne's Wooden Image.' And I am quite sure Ary Scheffer would in the 'Blithedale Romance.' The man who painted Mignon, and Margaret, could not fail with Priscilla, Hollingsworth, and Zenobia. But if any man of genius wishes to test anew, palette in hand, the possibile quia impossibile, I commend him to Shelley:

The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night
I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds,
Which trample the dim winds; in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars;
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,

As if the thing they loved fled on before,

And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair; then all
Sweep onward.

PANTHEA.

See, near the verge, another chariot stays;
An ivory shell, inlaid with crimson fire,
Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim
Of delicate strange tracery; the young spirit
That guides it has the dove-like eyes of hope.'

There, I think, is work for any one who can give shape and colour on canvass to airy nothing. Let him paint the steeds trampling the dim winds;' and let him not shirk making the winds visible. Observe, he might have done that, merely giving pawing steeds in the air, if it had not been for that adjective dim; but if the winds are dim' they are to be seen. And how to paint the crimson fire 'coming and going' in the rim of the shell? Probably, the man who painted the peacock's feather in Sir Ysumbras could come near that, but he could not do the rest of the picture. Perhaps Turner might have done it all.

I might mention as another proof of the 'spirit bounded and poor'

which I charge upon the immense majority of painters, including, as I said before, heaps of R.A.'s and Old Masters,' their vile selection of heads and faces in 'composed' pictures. Charles Dickens has said something of this in 'Little Dorrit,' but it is a subject which really deserves separate treatment. The same poverty of mind which gives you Cromwell in one dress for ever and ever, gives you a grey-haired dog-stealer for a Pilgrim Father, and a simpering ballet-girl for a Joan of Arc. Unfortunately, you cannot give people eyes, or teach them the use of them. Men like John Leech and George Cruikshank, who both have eyes, and know by instinct the right use of eyes, never give you monstrous anomalies which you find in the works of 'high art' and other idiots. If they were to paint Minerva, they would not give her a neck as wide from ear to ear as that of Venus, or a poet the back-head of a gladiator. John Leech is singularly careful in such particulars, and it pays him—and us-that he should be careful. Careless spectators cry out, Who measures back-heads in looking at a picture? I reply, thousands do, more or less. If anyone were drawn with a retreating brow helping a lame beggar, many an untutored eye would feel that there was an incongruity in the design, without being able to account for it; and so of other cases.

But we shall never make any impression upon the Artist' breed in the way of making them hear reason till we have blown up, like the windbag nonsense it is, all this German 'Kunst' business. Of late years we have been pestered with Art (with a capital A) till I, for one, have often exclaimed, in bitterness and vulgarity of soul, 'Bother Art!' This talk is three parts insincere, and it must be exploded. 'Artists' are very much like other people-the bulk of them -and their dignity' and 'mission' is a sham. The mob of minnows must not be allowed to trade on the honours and functions of the Tritons of Art. It is preposterous that fellows who can hardly spell, who quote in the fashion every year's Academy catalogue exemplifies, who sit late over grilled kidneys and gin-and-water at night-houses, when they ought to be with their wives in bed at home, should set up for 'world-teachers' on the strength of knowing how to mix their greys, and their lakes, and their bistres, and how to carry off a tower with an old woman in a red cloak. It is impossible for a sincere and unprejudiced person not to feel that the whole subject of the teaching of Art' has been very much overdone. If a picture stirs healthy sympathies in my mind, it does me good; the merest clown may insensibly gather a lesson when he finds hundreds of human beings mingling peacefully in such quiet enjoyment as that of an Art Treasury Exhibition, and through sympathy he may snatch even a higher joy; there are, of course, besides, direct and indirect educational influences attaching to the production and exhibition of good pictures. But, in stern, practical truth, what is the chief result to the workingman, or even the (perhaps) more intelligent clerk or foreman, of a day in a picture gallery? Commonly a-Headache! It is a great thing to get at the truth. A grain of fact is better than a bushel of half