epigrammatic. The first act of Sterne, on entering a drawing-room, was to take from his pocket a page of a new volume of Tristram Shandy and read it to the company. The poet of the Essay on Man, and the caricaturist of Trim, ascend immediately to the eye, while we read these slight circumstances of their private history.

Indications of character are recognised in pictures as well as in books. Raffaelle paints his own autobiography, as Spenser writes it. I will refer to the different aspects under which the history of the Crucifixion has been represented; consulting Burnet's notes on Reynolds, by the way. M. Angelo, whose power lay chiefly in expression and grace of contour, selected the view of the subject likeliest to favour his peculiar talent: Raffaelle, for the same reason, chose the point of time when the body is taken down. Tintoret concentrates his force in the suffering Mother at the foot of the Cross: Rubens dares every variety of attitude. In one design, we have the elevation of the Cross; in another, the executioners are breaking the legs of the thieves. Here, the grouping may be more effective; there, the colouring more brilliant; but in each and all, picturesque results, without regard to truth, are the aim proposed. In Rembrandt, light and shade become the conspicuous elements;

and, remembering that darkness overspread the land, he portrays the taking down from the Cross by moonlight. Thus, in the painter and the poet, the inward consciousness of power is beheld working by favourite instruments. One hand shows its cunning in light; a second, in shadow; a third, in anatomy; and men, books, and pictures, give us in their own way indications of character.

MAY 13th.-I was interested to-day by the remark of one of our most accomplished portraitpainters. He says that he has observed, in every celebrated person whose features he copied, from the Duke of Wellington downwards, a looking of the eye into remote space. The idea occurs often in literature. Milton, perhaps, led the way by his description of Melancholy:

with even step and musing gait,

And looks commercing with the skies,
The rapt soul sitting in her eyes!

Sterne assigns the same peculiarity to the face of his Monk, in the Sentimental Journey. His head, "mild, pale, penetrating; free from all common-place ideas of fat, contented ignorance looking downwards upon earth; it looked forward, but looked as if it looked at something be

yond the world." Nothing can be more exquisite than the iteration. The late Mr. Foster probably had this portrait in his remembrance, when he described the Christian in society-in the world, but not of it: "He is like a person whose eye, while he is conversing with you about an object, or a succession of objects, immediately near, should glance every moment towards some great spectacle appearing in the distant horizon."

Mr. Moore's elegant tale of the Epicurean supplies another example: Alethe raises a silver cup from the shrine-" Bringing it close to her lips, she kissed it with a religious fervour; then turning her eyes mournfully upwards, held them fixed with a degree of earnestness, as if in that moment, in direct communion with heaven, they saw neither roof nor any earthly barrier between them and the skies." And a fourth illustration is furnished by Mr. Keble, in his picture of Balaam foretelling the happiness of Israel, and the rising of the Star:

O for a sculptor's hand,

That thou might'st take thy stand,

Thy wild hair floating on the eastern breeze;

Thy tranc'd yet open gaze

Fix'd on the desert haze,

As one who deep in heaven some airy pageant sees.

The artist to whom I alluded does not add

literature to his genius. I believe that he never heard of Foster; it is just possible that he may be unacquainted with Sterne. His remark would then be the fruit of independent and individual experience; and on that account lending a most interesting commentary upon the illustrations of fancy.

MAY 14th.-The earliest editor of Bossuet's Sermons describes the writer to have been a diligent student of Tertullian, Chrysostom, and Augustine. But he looks on him as appropriating what he borrows, and being scarcely less original when he quotes than when he invents. This is only an exaggerated anticipation of Hall's panegyric of Burke's imperial fancy, "laying all nature under tribute." Such a mind translates an image into its own language, as we may learn from two of our poets: Cowley describes the equipment of Goliath, and Milton puts it into the hands of Satan:

Here Milton heightens the picture by circumstances that impart to it the dignity of invention. The spear of the Devil is far grander than that of the Giant. It is the difference between the dialect of gods and men in the Iliad. We read the same lesson in Art. The eye of taste has long been familiar with the Notte of Correggio, and the flowing out of light from the Child into the Mother's face. The thought itself, however, was not new. In the Vatican fresco of St. Peter delivered from prison, Raffaelle makes the lustre proceed from the angel. Correggio and Milton, therefore, are imitators alike, but their debts do not diminish their capital. Each carries large interest. I think the same allowance is due to Campbell and Rogers in the following verses; although, in the case of the second writer, a note of acknowledgment seems to be demanded. The passage from Campbell occurs in his description of Adam wandering restless through Paradise, before the creation of Eve:—

And say, without our hopes, without our fears,
Without the home that plighted love endears,
Without the smile, from partial beauty won,

Oh! what were man ?—a world without a sun.

The last line is the most striking of the four, but it is at least twelve hundred years old. Luther