1.We like this picture of a Concert the best of the three by Titian in the same room. The other two are a Ganymede, and a Venus and Adonis; the last does not appear to us from the hand of Titian.

2.The Reader, if he pleases, may turn to an Essay on this subject in the Round Table.

3.Two thirds of the principal pictures in the Orleans Collection are at present at Cleveland-House, one third purchased by the Marquis of Stafford, and another third left by the Duke of Bridgewater, another of the purchasers Mr. Brian had the remaining third.

4.‘Aut Erasmus aut Diabolus.’ Sir Thomas More’s exclamation on meeting with the philosopher of Rotterdam.

5.The late Mr. Curran described John Kemble’s eye in these words.

6.It is said in the catalogue to be painted on touch-stone.

7.Written in February, 1823.

8.We heard it well said the other day, that ‘Rubens’s pictures were the palette of Titian.’

9.This is not absolutely true. Mr. Banks the younger, and another young gentleman, formed an exception to this rule, and contrived to get into the Abbey-grounds, in spite of warning, just as the recluse proprietor happened to be passing by the spot. Instead, however, of manifesting any displeasure, he gave them a most polite reception, shewed them whatever they expressed a wish to see, asked them to dinner, and after passing the day in the greatest conviviality, dismissed them by saying, ‘That they might get out as they got in.’ This was certainly a good jest. Our youthful adventurers on forbidden ground, in the midst of their festive security, might have expected some such shrewd turn from the antithetical genius of the author of Vathek, who makes his hero, in a paroxysm of impatience, call out for ‘the Koran and sugar!’

10.From the New Monthly Magazine.

11.See an Essay on the Genius of Hogarth, by C. Lamb.

12.One would think that a people so devoted to perfumes, who deal in essences and scents, and have fifty different sorts of snuffs, would be equally nice, and offended at the approach of every disagreeable odour. Not so. They seem to have no sense of the disagreeable in smells or tastes, as if their heads were stuffed with a cold, and hang over a dunghill, as if it were a bed of roses, or swallow the most detestable dishes with the greatest relish. The nerve of their sensibility is bound up at the point of pain. A Frenchman (as far as I can find) has no idea answering to the word nasty; or if he has, feels a predilection for, instead of an aversion to, it. So in morals they bid fair to be the Sybarites of the modern world. They make the best of every thing (which is a virtue)—and treat the worst with levity or complaisance (which is a vice). They harbour no antipathies. They would swallow Gil Blas’s supper as a luxury, and boast of it afterwards as a feat. Their moral system is not sustained by the two opposite principles of attraction and repulsion, for they are shocked at nothing: what excites horror or disgust in other minds, they consider as a bagatelle; it is resolved into an abstraction of agreeable sensations, a source of amusement. There is an oil of self-complacency in their constitutions, which takes the sting out of evil, and neutralizes the poison of corruption. They, therefore, can commit atrocities with impunity, and wallow in disgrace without a blush, as no other people can. There is Monsieur Chateaubriand, for instance. Who would not suppose that the very echo of his own name would hoot him out of the world? So far from it, his pamphlet On the Censorship has just come to a third edition, and is stuck all over Paris!

13.This is not correct; there is no foot-path in France, but there is a side-path, claiming, I presume, the same privileges.

14.‘There is nothing which an Englishman enjoys so much as the pleasure of sulkiness.’—Edinburgh Review, No. 80.

15.We may trace something of their national origin in both their minds. In Claude there is the French finicalness, and love of minute details; but there is a fusion of all these into the most perfect harmony from the influence of a southern sky, and he has none of the flimsiness or littleness of effect, to which his countrymen are prone. Again, it cannot be denied that there is a certain setness and formality, a didactic or prosing vein in Nicolas Poussin’s compositions. He proceeds on system, has a deliberate purpose to make out, and is often laboured, monotonous, and extravagant. His pictures are the finest subjects in the world for French criticism—to point the moral, or detach an episode. He is somewhat pedantic and over-significant, in the manner of French orators and poets. He had, like his countrymen, no great eye for nature or truth of expression; but he had what they chiefly want—imagination, or the power of placing himself in the circumstances of others. Poussin, in fact, held a middle place between Raphael and other painters of the Italian school, who have embodied the highest poetry of expression, and the common run of French artists, whose utmost stretch of invention reaches no farther than correctness in the costume and chronology of their subject.

16.It is at Florence.

17.Is not a monkey grave when it is doing nothing, or when it is not employed in mischief?

18.The French phrase for being present at a play is, to assist at it. It must be owned that there is some appearance of truth in the expression.

19.Inventor of the Diorama.

20.It is the same idle, inveterate self-complacency, the same limited comprehension, that has been their ruin in every thing. Parisian exquisites could not conceive that it snowed in Russia, nor how it was possible for barbarians to bivouac in the Champs ElysÉes. But they have forgotten the circumstance altogether. Why should I remind them of it?

21.French pictures, to be thoroughly and unexceptionably good, ought to be translated back again into sculpture, from which they are originally taken.

22.Yet they tax Shakspeare with grossness and barbarity. There is nothing like this scene in all his plays, except Titus Andronicus, which is full of the same tragic exaggeration and tautology. I was walking out (this 1st of October—a clear grey autumnal morning) in the gardens of the Tuileries, and seeing the long, tall avenue of trees before me that leads up to the barrier of Neuilly, it put me in mind of former times, of prints and pictures of the scenery and roads in foreign countries which I had been used to from a child, with the old-fashioned look of every thing around Paris, as if it were the year 1724, instead of 1824, till the view before me seemed to become part of a dream, or to transport me into past time, or to raise itself up in my imagination, like a picture in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ I wondered whether Buonaparte sometimes thought of this view when he was at St. Helena. I checked myself in this strain of speculation as overcharged and disproportioned to the occasion, according to the correct and elegant taste of the people where I was, when on a post opposite, I saw stuck up in large letters, ‘Pension de l’Univers,’ meaning a tenpenny ordinary. These are the people that are continually crying out against the extravagance and bombast of their neighbours. Their imagination runs to the ends of the universe, when it has nothing but words to carry—no people so magnificent, so prodigal of professions, so hyperbolical as they—add but meaning or a weight of feeling to them, and they complain bitterly of the load, and throw it off as barbarous, intolerable, Gothic, and uncouth. It is not the extravagance of the style, then, with which they quarrel, but the palpableness of the imagery which gives a blow to their slender intellectual stamina, or the accumulation of feeling about it with which they have not firmness or comprehension to grapple. ‘Dip it in the ocean, and it will stand’—says Sterne’s barber of the buckle of his wig. They magnify trifles, con amore; it is only when a poor struggling attempt is to be made to gain relief from the ‘perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart,’ or to embody the swelling conceptions of the soul in remote and lofty images, that they shrink back with the timidity of women and the formality of pedants.

23.The Orpheus and Eurydice of DrÖlling is a performance of great merit. The females, floating in the air before Orpheus, are pale as lilies, and beautiful in death. But he need hardly despair, or run wild as he does. He may easily overtake them; and as to vanishing, they have no appearance of it. Their figures are quite solid and determined in their outline.

24.See the admirably-drawn, but painful scene in Evelina between Captain Mervin and Monsieur Dubois.

25.A French dwarf, exhibited in London some years ago, and who had the misfortune to be born a mere trunk, grew enraged at the mention of another dwarf as a rival in bodily imperfection, and after insisting that the other had both hands and feet, exclaimed emphatically, ‘Mais moi, je suis unique.’ My old acquaintance (Dr. Stoddart) used formerly to recount this trait of French character very triumphantly, but then it was in war-time. He may think it indecent to have here hinted any such thing of an individual of a nation with whom we are at peace. At present, he seems to have become a sort of portent and by-word himself among English politicians; and without head or heart may exclaim—‘Mais moi, je suis unique!‘—See his late articles on the Spanish Refugees, &c. Would such a man have been any better, had he never turned renegade, or had he become (his first ambition) a revolutionary leader? Would he not have been as blood-thirsty, as bigoted, as perverse and ridiculous on the side of the question he left, as on the one he has come over to? It imports little what men are, so long as they are themselves. The great misfortune of a certain class of persons (both for their own sake and that of others) is ever to have been born or heard of!

26.I remember being once much amused with meeting, in a hot dusty day, between Blenheim and Oxford, some strolling Italians with a troop of dancing dogs, and a monkey in costume mounted on the back of one of them. He rode en cavalier, and kept his countenance with great gravity and decorum, and turned round with a certain look of surprise and resentment, that I, a foot-passenger, should seem to question his right to go on horseback. This seemed to me a fine piece of practical satire in the manner of Swift.

27.Mr. Wordsworth, in some fine lines, reproaches the French with having ‘no single volume paramount, no master-spirit’—

I wish he would shew any single author that exercises such a ‘paramount’ influence over the minds of the English, as four or five ‘master-spirits’ do on those of the French. The merit is not here the question, but the effect produced. He himself is not a very striking example of the sanguine enthusiasm with which his countrymen identify themselves with works of great and original genius!

28.The same circumstance literally happened to Gibbon, though from a different cause. He fell on his knees before a Swiss lady (I think a Mademoiselle d’Ivernois,) and was so fat he could not rise. She left him in this posture, and sent in a servant to help him up.

29.The fronts of the houses and of many of the finest buildings seem (so to speak) to have been composed in mud, and translated into stone—so little projection, relief, or airiness have they. They have a look of being stuck together.

30.They are as different as Mr. Moore’s verses and an epic poem.

31.The French physiognomy is like a telegraphic machine, ready to shift and form new combinations every moment. It is commonly too light and variable for repose; it is careless, indifferent, but not sunk in indolence, nor wedded to ease: as on the other hand, it is restless, rapid, extravagant, without depth or force. Is it not the same with their feelings, which are alike incapable of a habit of quiescence, or of persevering action or passion? It seems so to me. Their freedom from any tendency to drunkenness, to indulge in its dreamy stupor, or give way to its incorrigible excesses, confirms by analogy the general view of their character. I do not bring this as an accusation against them, I ask if it is not the fact; and if it will not account for many things observable in them, good, bad, and indifferent? In a word, mobility without momentum solves the whole riddle of the French character.

32.Lord Byron has merely taken up the common cant of connoisseurship, inflating it with hyperbolical and far-fetched eulogies of his own—not perceiving that the Apollo was somewhat of a coxcomb, the Venus somewhat insipid, and that the expression in the Laocoon is more of physical than of mental agony. The faces of the boys are, however, superlatively fine. They are convulsed with pain, yet fraught with feeling. He has made a better hit in interpreting the downcast look of the Dying Gladiator, as denoting his insensibility to the noise and bustle around him:—

33.Why do the French confound the words exhibition and exposure? One of which expresses what is creditable, and the other what is disgraceful. Is it that the sense of vanity absorbs every other consideration, turning the sense of shame, in case of exposure, into a source of triumph, and the conscious tingling feeling of ostentation in a display of talent into a flagrant impropriety? I do not lay much stress on this word-catching, which is a favourite mode of German criticism. We say, for instance, indiscriminately, that ‘a thing redounds to our credit or our disgrace.’

34.It were to be wished that the French sculptors would come over and look at the Elgin Marbles, as they are arranged with great care and some pomp in the British Museum. They may smile to see that we are willing to remove works of art from their original places of abode, though we will not allow others to do so. These noble fragments of antiquity might startle our fastidious neighbours a little at first from their rude state and their simplicity, but I think they would gain upon them by degrees, and convince their understandings, if they did not subdue their affections. They are indeed an equally instructive lesson and unanswerable rebuke to them and to us—to them for thinking that finishing every part alike is perfection, and to us who imagine that to leave every part alike unfinished is grandeur. They are as remote from finicalness as grossness, and combine the parts with the whole in the manner that nature does. Every part is given, but not ostentatiously, and only as it would appear in the circumstances. There is an alternate action and repose. If one muscle is strained, another is proportionably relaxed. If one limb is in action and another at rest, they come under a different law, and the muscles are not brought out nor the skin tightened in the one as in the other. There is a flexibility and sway of the limbs and of the whole body. The flesh has the softness and texture of flesh, not the smoothness or stiffness of stone. There is an undulation and a liquid flow on the surface, as the breath of genius moved the mighty mass: they are the finest forms in the most striking attitudes, and with every thing in its place, proportion, and degree, uniting the ease, truth, force, and delicacy of Nature. They shew nothing but the artist’s thorough comprehension of, and entire docility to that great teacher. There is no petit-maitreship, no pedantry, no attempt at a display of science, or at forcing the parts into an artificial symmetry, but it is like cutting a human body out of a block of marble, and leaving it to act for itself with all the same springs, levers, and internal machinery. It was said of Shakspeare’s dramas, that they were the logic of passion; and it may be affirmed of the Elgin Marbles, that they are the logic of form.—One part being given, another cannot be otherwise than it is. There is a mutual understanding and re-action throughout the whole frame. The Apollo and other antiques are not equally simple and severe. The limbs have too much an appearance of being cased in marble, of making a display of every recondite beauty, and of balancing and answering to one another, like the rhymes in verse. The Elgin Marbles are harmonious, flowing, varied prose. In a word, they are like casts after the finest nature. Any cast from nature, however inferior, is in the same style. Let the French and English sculptors make casts continually. The one will see in them the parts everywhere given—the other will see them everywhere given in subordination to, and as forming materials for a whole.

35.For some account of Madame Pasta’s acting in Nina, I take the liberty to refer to a volume of Table-Talk, just published.

36.At Milan, a short time ago, a gentleman had a Homer, in Greek and Latin, among his books. He was surlily asked to explain what it meant. Upon doing so, the Inspector shook his head doubtingly, and said, ‘it might pass this time,’ but advised him to beware of a second. ‘Here, now, is a work,’ he continued, pointing to ——’s Lives of the Popes, containing all the abominations (public and private) of their history, ‘You should bring such books as this with you!’ This is one specimen of that learned conspiracy for the suppression of light and letters, of which we are sleeping partners and honorary associates. The Allies complain at present of Mr. Canning’s ‘faithlessness.’ Oh! that he would indeed play them false and earn his title of ‘slippery George!’ Faithful to anything he cannot be—faithless to them would be something. The Austrians, it is said, have lately attempted to strike the name of Italy out of the maps, that that country may neither have a name, a body, or a soul left to it, and even to suppress the publication of its finest historians, that it may forget it ever had one. Go on, obliging creatures! Blot the light out of heaven, tarnish the blue sky with the blight and fog of despotism, deface and trample on the green earth; for while one trace of what is fair or lovely is left in the earth under our feet, or the sky over our heads, or in the mind of man that is within us, it will remain to mock your impotence and deformity, and to reflect back lasting hatred and contempt upon you. Why does not our Eton scholar, our classic Statesman, suggest to the Allies an intelligible hint of the propriety of inscribing the name of Italy once more on the map,

of taking off the prohibition on the Histories of Guicciardini and Davila? Or why do not the English people—the English House of Commons, suggest it to him? Is there such a thing as the English people—as an English House of Commons? Their influence is not felt at present in Europe, as erst it was, to its short-lived hope, bought with flat despair. The reason is, the cause of the people of Europe has no echo in the breasts of the British public. The cause of Kings had an echo in the breast of a British Monarch—that of Foreign Governments in the breasts of British Ministers! There are at present no fewer than fifteen hundred of the Italian nobility of the first families proscribed from their country, or pining in dungeons. For what? For trying to give to their country independence and a Constitutional Government, like England! What says the English House of Lords to that? What if the Russians were to come and apply to us and to them the benefits and the principles of the Holy Alliance—the bayonet and the thumbscrew? Lord Bathurst says, ‘Let them come;’—and they will come when we have a servile people, dead to liberty, and an arbitrary government, hating and ready to betray it!

37.Why have they such quantities of looking-glasses in Italy, and none in Scotland? The dirt in each country is equal; the finery not. Neither in Scotland do they call in the aid of the Fine Arts, of the upholsterer and tapissier, to multiply the images of the former in squalid decorations, and thus shew that the debasement is moral as well as physical. They write up on certain parts of Rome ‘Immondizia.’ A Florentine asked why it was not written on the gates of Rome? An Englishman might be tempted to ask, why it is not written on the gates of Calais, to serve for the rest of the Continent? If the people and houses in Italy are as dirty or dirtier than in France, the streets and towns are kept in infinitely better order.

38.See Westminster Review.

39.They tell a story in Paris of a monkey at the Jardin des Plantes, that was noted for its mischievous tricks and desire to fly at every one. Dr. Gall observed the organ of philanthropy particularly strong in the beast, and desired the keeper to let him loose, when he sprung upon the Doctor, and hugged him round the neck with the greatest bon-hommie and cordiality, to the astonishment of the keeper and the triumph of craniology! Some men are as troublesome as some animals with their demonstrations of benevolence.

40.He was confined in the Inquisition about six weeks, where it is supposed he was put to the torture; for he had strange pains in his limbs, and bodily disabilities afterwards. In the Museum here is at present preserved, in a glass-case, a finger of Galileo, pointing to the skies! Such is the history of philosophy and superstition.

41.The jewellers’ shops on the bridge, in one of which he was brought up, still remain. The Rape of the Sabines, by John of Bologna, near Benvenuto’s Perseus, is an admirable group: nothing can exceed the fleshiness and softened contours of the female figure, seen in every direction.

42.See his Memoirs of himself, lately re-translated by Thomas Roscoe, Esq.

43.Excellent tea is to be had at Rome at an Italian shop at the corner of the Via Condotti, in the Piazza di Spagna.

44.We have five names unrivalled in modern times and in their different ways:—Newton, Locke, Bacon, Shakspeare, and Milton—and if to these we were to add a sixth that could not be questioned in his line, perhaps it would be Hogarth. Our wit is the effect not of gaiety, but spleen—the last result of a pertinacious reductio ad absurdum. Our greatest wits have been our gravest men. Fielding seems to have produced his History of a Foundling with the same deliberation and forethought that Arkwright did his spinning-jenny. The French have no poetry; that is, no combination of internal feeling with external imagery. Their dramatic dialogue is frothy verbiage or a mucilage of sentiment without natural bones or substance: ours constantly clings to the concrete, and has a purchase upon matter. Outward objects interfere with and extinguish the flame of their imagination: with us they are the fuel that kindle it into a brighter and stronger blaze.