subordinate to the conception of the situation displayed in this extraordinary production. A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain raptures of connubial anticipation, with suitable acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing in the countenance of the first bridegroom; something like the divided attention of the child (Adam was here a child-man) between the given toy and the mother who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade, considering the awful presence they were in, would have taken care to subtract something from the expression of the more human passion, and to heighten the more spiritual one. This would be as much as an exhibition-goer from the opening of Somerset House to last year's show has been encouraged to look for. It is obvious to hint at a lower expression yet, in a picture that, for respects of drawing and colouring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these art-fostering walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety-nine, the gratitude as one, or perhaps zero! By neither the one passion nor the other has Raphael expounded the situation of Adam. Singly upon his brow sits the absorbing sense of wonder at the created miracle. The moment is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of the conflicting emotions-a moment how abstracted-has had time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery. We have seen a landscape of a justly-admired neoteric, in which he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely beautiful in antiquity-the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr.

-justice, he had painted a laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme by Poussin is somehow a facsimile for the situation), looking over into the world shut out backwards, so that none but a "still-climbing Hercules" could hope to catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. No conventual porter could keep his eyes better than this custos with the "lidless eyes." He not only sees that none do intrude into that privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that none but Hercules aut Diabolus by any manner of means can. So far all is well. We have absolute solitude here or nowhere. Ab extra the damsels are snug enough. But here the artist's courage seems to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty charge, and, to comfort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of honour or ladies of the bedchamber, according to the approved etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century; giving to the whole scene the air of a fête champêtre, if we will but excuse the absence of the gentlemen. This is well, and Watteauish. But what is become of the solitary mystery — the

Daughters three,

That sing around the golden tree?

This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated this subject. The paintings, or rather the stupendous architectural designs, of a modern artist have been urged as objections to the theory of our They are of a character, we confess, to stagger it.

motto.

His

towered structures are of the highest order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams or transcripts of some elder workmanship -Assyrian ruins old-restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On that side, the imagination of the artist halts and appears defective. Let us examine the point of the story in the "Belshazzar's Feast." We will introduce it by an apposite anecdote.

The court historians of the day record that at the first dinner given by the late King (then Prince Regent) at the Pavilion, the following characteristic frolic was played off. The guests were select and admiring, the banquet profuse and admirable, the lights lustrous and Oriental, the eye was perfectly dazzled with the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar, brought from the regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose-itself a tower!-stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now the Rev. -, the then admired court chaplain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a signal given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency was discovered, in which glittered in gold letters—

"BRIGHTON-EARTHQUAKE-SWALLOW-UP-ALIVE!"

Imagine the confusion of the guests; the Georges and garters, jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occasion; the fans dropped and picked up the next morning by the sly court pages; Mrs. Fitz-what's-hername fainting, and the Countess of - holding the smelling-bottle; till the good-humoured Prince caused harmony to be restored by calling in fresh candles, and declaring that the whole was nothing but a pantomime hoax, got up by the ingenious Mr. Farley of Covent Garden, from hints which his Royal Highness himself had furnished! Then imagine the infinite applause that followed, the mutual rallyings, the declarations that "they were not much frightened," of the assembled galaxy.

The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the appearance of the transparency in the anecdote. The huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, the alarms, and the mock alarm; the prettinesses heightened by consternation; the courtier's fear which was flattery, and the lady's which was affectation; all that we may conceive to have taken place in a mob of Brighton courtiers, sympathising with the well-acted surprise of their sovereign; all this, and no more, is exhibited by the well-dressed lords and ladies in the hall of Belus. Just this sort of consternation we have seen among a flock of disquieted wild geese at the report only of a gun having gone off!

But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the preservation of their persons-such as we have witnessed at a theatre when a slight alarm of fire has been given-an adequate exponent of a supernatural terror?-the way in which the finger of God writing judgments would have been met by the withered conscience? There is a human fear and a divine fear. The one is disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape. The other is bowed down, effortless, passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of the night

and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts of the Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber or to call up the servants? But let us see in the text what there is to justify all this huddle of vulgar consternation.

From the works of Daniel it appears Belshazzar had made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. The golden and silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the princes, the king's concubines, and his wives. Then follows

"In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosened, and his knees smote one against another."

This is the plain text. By no hint can it be otherwise inferred but that the appearance was solely confined to the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain was troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there present, not even by the queen herself, who merely undertakes for the interpretation of the phenomenon, as related to her, doubtless, by her husband. The lords are simply said to be astonished, i.e., at the trouble and the change of countenance in their sovereign. Even the prophet does not appear to have seen the scroll, which the king saw. He recalls it only, as Joseph did the dream to the King of Egypt. "Then was the part of the hand sent from him [the Lord], and this writing was written." He speaks of the phantasm

as past.

Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of the miraclethis message to a royal conscience, singly expressed-for it was said, "Thy kingdom is divided"-simultaneously impressed upon the fancies of a thousand courtiers, who were implied in it neither directly nor grammatically?

But admitting the artist's own version of the story, and that the sight was seen also by the thousand courtiers-let it have been visible to all Babylon-as the knees of Balshazzar were shaken and his countenance troubled, even so would the knees of every man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, have been troubled; bowed, bent down, so would they have remained, stuporfixed, with no thought of struggling with that inevitable judgment."

Not all that is optically possible to be seen is to be shown in every picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant individualities in a "Marriage at Cana" by Veronese or Titian, to the very texture and colour of the wedding-garments, the ring glittering upon the bride's finger, the metal and fashion of the wine-pots; for at such seasons there is leisure and luxury to be curious. But in a "day of judgment," or in a "day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual eye of an agent or patient in the immediate scene would see, only in masses and indistinction. Not only the female attire and jewellery exposed to the critical eye of fashion, as minutely as the dresses in a Lady's Magazine, in the criticised picture, but perhaps the curiosities of anatomical

science and studied diversities of posture in the falling angels and sinners of Michael Angelo have no business in their great subjects. There was no leisure for them.

By a wise falsification the great masters of painting got at their true conclusions; by not showing the actual appearances, that is, all was to be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or suffering of some portentous action. Suppose the moment of the swallowing up of Pompeii. There they were to be scen-houses, columns, architectural proportions, differences of public and private buildings, men and women at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly, but physically they were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclipsing moment which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses are upturned from their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only? A thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to contemplate the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with antiquarian coolness the pots and pans of Pompeii. "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception sees aught but the heroic son of Nun with the outstretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious? Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen on open plain or winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have been conscious of this array at the interposition of the synchronic miracle? Yet in the picture of this subject by the artist of the "Belshazzar's Feast"-no ignoble work either the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye may dart through rank and file traverse" for some minutes before it shall discover among his armed followers which is Joshua! Not modern art alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be detected erring from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes in the great picture at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits. Was it from a feeling that the crowd of half-impassioned bystanders, and the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have not heard, or but faintly have been told of the passing miracle, admirable as they are in design and hue-for it is a glorified work-do not respond adequately to the action, that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the interest? Now that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny; but would they see them or can the mind

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in the conception of it admit of such unconcerning objects? can it think of them at all? or what associating league to the imagination can there be between the seers and the seers not of a presential miracle?

Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron would not or ought not to be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks? Dissect those woods, and place the same figure among fountains and falls of pellucid water, and you have-a Naiad! Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio Romano, we think-for it is long since: there, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twisting with its limbs her own, till both seemed either-these, animated branches; those, disanimated members-yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently kept distinct-his Dryad lay-an approximation of two natures, which to conceive it must be seen; analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations.

To the lowest subjects, and to a superficial comprehension the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. The large eye of genius saw in the meanness of present objects their capabilities of treatment from their relations to some grand past or future. How has Raphael-we must still linger about the Vatican-treated the humble craft of the shipbuilder in his "Building of the Ark"? It is in that scriptural series to which we have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to be of a higher and more poetic grade than even the Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking. There is a cowardice in modern art. As the Frenchman, of whom Coleridge's friend made the prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael Angelo collected no inferences beyond that of a he-goat and a Cornuto, so from this subject of mere mechanic promise it would instinctively turn away, as from one incapable of investiture with any grandeur. The dockyards at Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depôt at Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical preparations in the shipyards of Civita Vecchia did Raphael look for instructions when he imagined the building of the vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In the intensity of the action he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought and with holy prescience, giving directions. And there are his agents-the solitary but sufficient Three-hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus, under some instinctive rather than technical guidance; giant-muscled; every one a Hercules, or liker to those Vulcanian Three that in sounding caverns under Mongibello wrought in fire-Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon. So work the workmen that should repair a world!

Artists, again, err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial subjects.