and the rant of Lee to the tenderness of Otway." Goldsmith's criticism was generally false, for Ovid includes Tibullus. However, some of his verses are very elegant; Mr. Cary, the translator of Dante, applauds the conclusion of the first elegy, as one of the finest passages he

remembered-and few modern scholars had a wider acquaintance with poetic literature. Lanzi remarks, that he who feels what Tibullus is in poetry, knows what Andrea del Sarto is in painting. The parallel is apt; Sarto was distinguished by the finish of his style. In his "Holy Family Reposing," every hair has a distinct truth. The colouring of the painter corresponds with the language of the poet. In the fourth elegy of his third book, he describes himself tossing through a troubled night, until, as the sun rose above the hills, he fell asleep. Suddenly his chamber brightened with a beautiful apparition, which is most exquisitely described. Each word has its hue, like the separate hairs in Sarto's picture. Of all such excellence as that of Tibullus, the secret is labour. "I am glad your Fan' is

6

mounted so soon; but I would have you varnish and glaze it at your leisure, and polish the sticks as much as you can." This was Pope's advice to Gay, which he was too indolent to follow.

D

Genius, when it has the large sensitive eyes of taste, is slow and painful: Guido never satisfied himself with an eye, nor A. Caracci with an ear. When Domenichino was reproached for not finishing a picture, he said, "I am continually painting it within myself." How often Milton sat under a cedar with Eve, and Shakspere gazed into the passionate eyes of Juliet, before the last animating glow of beauty was imparted!

MAY 9th. I see they are reprinting the speeches of Mr. Fox. It is known that Burke called him a most able debater. The praise was characteristic of the utterer and the subject. Milton found little to commend in the poetry of Dryden; and Rubens would probably have turned away in disgust from the painted histories of Hogarth. Burke did not exclude the idea of eloquence from his definition. To Fox belonged the visible rhetoric. He swelled with the tide of invective, and rose upon the flood of his indignation. A dear friend has given me a vivid portrait of his manner and appearance. Holding his hat grasped in both hands, and waved up and down with an ever-increasing velocity, while his face was turned to the gallery, he

anger, ex

poured out tempestuous torrents of ultation, and scorn. But Fox the declaimer was paralyzed by Fox the man. It was affirmed by a Greek writer, in a passage made famous by Ben Jonson, that a poet cannot be great without first being good; and Aristotle intimates, that the personal purity of the orator was a question moved in his own day. Fox showed the truth of this critical axiom. His intellectual capacity was impaired by the moral. The statue is imposing, but the pedestal leans.

I will add that the late Mr. Green of Ipswich, an acute and well-informed observer, referred with admiration to Fox's speeches on the reform of Parliament in 1797, on the Russian armament, and to his reply on the India Bill in 1783, which he pronounced to be absolutely stupendous. His character had, however, one side of grace and beauty-he delighted in the simpleness of rural pleasures, and his eye was open to all the charms of literature and taste. It is very refreshing to accompany the stormy Cleon of Westminster into the shades of St. Anne's Hill, and see him, in the description of his surviving friend,

- so soon of care beguiled,

Playful, sincere, and artless as a child,

enjoying the sunshine and flowers with an almost

bucolic tenderness and freedom from restraint;

either

watching a bird's nest in the spray,

Through the green leaves exploring day by day;

or, with a volume of Dryden in his hand, wandering from grove to grove and seat to seat—

To read there with a fervour all his own,

And in his grand and melancholy tone,

Some splendid passage not to him unknown.

MAY 10th.-Rode over to Bramshill, the seat of Sir John Cope, and looked at Vandyck's portrait of himself. "That Flemish painter-that Antonio Vandyck—what a power he has!" The apostrophe which Scott puts into the mouth of Cromwell at Whitehall, before the picture of Charles I., rises to every lip in the presence of Vandyck. In truth of imitation, delicacy of drawing, and dignity of expression, he stands alone. No starveling forms of Albert Durer, to adopt a phrase of Fuseli-no swampy excrescences of Rembrandt, shuffle along in squalid deformity. Waller suggested the secret charm of his pencil in a most speaking line

Strange! that thy hand should not inspire

The beauty only, but the fire;

Not the form alone and grace,

But art and power of a face.

In a page on portrait-painters, I cannot omit two of different tastes, yet most wonderful genius

are

-Holbein and Giorgione. No masters more unlike; each is the antithesis of the other. Hazlitt thought that the works of Holbein are to the finest efforts of the pencil, what state papers are to history: they present the character in part, but only the dry, the concrete, the fixed. Giorgione, on the contrary, gives the inner spirit and life of thought. His faces are ideal, and yet real. The same countenance painted by Holbein and Giorgione, would resemble an English story told by Holinshed and illuminated by Spenser. Both are precious-the fact as authenticating the poetry, and the poetry as embellishing the fact. In a parallel, Rubens would naturally come in; but Raffaelle cannot be bracketed.

Something of imaginative reality is seen in Vandyck; in general beauty and completeness, he yields to Titian. "Vandyck's portraits," said Northcote, "are like pictures; Reynolds', like reflections in a looking-glass; Titian's, like the real people." Mr. Eastlake has a very interesting remark on this characteristic of Titian, in a note to Goethe's theory of colours. He observes, with reference to the flesh-tint, that its effects, at different distances, can never be so well compared, as when the painter and his subject draw near and go by each other on an element so smooth, in scenery so tranquil, as Venice afforded to its