En usez vous, mon cher monsieur! (The marquis says the "Macaba " is delicious.) What a splendor of color there is in that cloud! What a richness, what 8. freedom of handling, and what a marvellous precision! I trod upon your Excellency's corn?-a thousand pardons. His Excellency grins and declares that he rather likes to have his corns trodden on. Were you ever very angry with Soultabout that Murillo which we have bought? The The veteran loved that picture because it saved the life of a fellow-creature the fellow-creature who hid it, and whom the Duke intended to hang unless the picture was forthcoming.

Potter's pale, eager face, and yonder | lian's triumph. The procédé was peu is the magnificent work by which the delicat? young fellow achieved his fame. How did you, so young, come to paint so well? What hidden power lay in that weakly lad that enabled him to achieve such a wonderful victory? Could little Mozart, when he was five years old, tell you how he came to play those wonderful sonatas? Potter was gone out of the world before he was thirty, but left this prodigy (and I know not how many more specimens of his genius and skill) behind him. The details of this admirable picture are as curious as the effect is admirable and complete. The weather being unsettled, and clouds and sunshine in the gusty sky, we saw in our little tour numberless Paul Potters - the meadows streaked We gave several thousand pounds with sunshine and spotted with the for it how many thousand? About cattle, the city twinkling in the dis- its merit is a question of taste which tance, the thunder-clouds glooming we will not here argue. If you overhead. Napoleon carried off the choose to place Murillo in the first picture (vide Murray) amongst the class of painters, founding his claim spoils of his bow and spear to decorate upon these Virgin altar-pieces, I am his triumph of the Louvre. If I were your humble servant. Tom Moore a conquering prince, I would have painted altar-pieces as well as Milton, this picture certainly, and the Raphael and warbled Sacred Songs and Loves "Madonna" from Dresden, and the of the Angels after his fashion. I Titian "Assumption " from Venice, wonder did Watteau ever try historiand that matchless Rembrandt of the cal subjects? And as for Greuze, "Dissection." The prostrate nations you know that his heads will fetch would howl with rage as my gen- 1,000l., 1,500l., 2,000l., - as much as darmes took off the pictures, nicely a Sêvres "cabaret" of Rose du Barri. packed, and addressed to "Mr. the If cost price is to be your criterion of Director of my Imperial Palace of worth, what shall we say to that little the Louvre, at Paris. This side up- receipt for 10l. for the copyright of permost." The Austrians, Prussians," Paradise Lost," which used to hang Saxons, Italians, &c., should be free to in old Mr. Rogers's room? When come and visit my capital, and bleat living painters, as frequently happens with tears before the pictures torn from in our days, see their pictures sold at their native cities. Their ambassa-auctions for four or five times the dors would meekly remonstrate, and sums which they originally received, with faded grins make allusions to are they enraged or elated? A hunthe feeling of despair occasioned by dred years ago the state of the picthe absence of the beloved works of ture-market was different: that dreaart. Bah! I would offer them a ry old Italian stock was much higher pinch of snuff out of my box as I than at present; Rembrandt himself, a walked along my gallery, with their close man, was known to be in diffiExcellencies cringing after me. culties. If ghosts are fond of money Zenobia was a fine woman and a still, what a wrath his must be at queen, but she had to walk in Aure- the present value of his works!

The Hague Rembrandt is the Having beheld it you have lived in the greatest and grandest of all his pieces year 1648, and celebrated the treaty to my mind. Some of the heads are of Munster. You have shaken the as sweetly and lightly painted as hands of the Dutch Guardsmen, Gainsborough; the faces not ugly, eaten from their platters, drunk their but delicate and high-bred; the ex- Rhenish, heard their jokes, as they quisite gray tones are charming to wagged their jolly beards. The Ammark and study; the heads not sterdam Catalogue discourses thus plastered, but painted with a free, about it: a model catalogue: it liquid brush: the result, one of the gives you the prices paid, the signagreat victories won by this consum-tures of the painters, a succinct demate chief, and left for the wonder scription of the work. and delight of succeeding ages.

wards the upectator frankly and com- | such another. If you do, do pray placently.

"The man behind him is probably one of the sergeants. His head is bare. He wears a cuirass, and yellow gloves, gray stockings, and boots with large tops, and kneecaps of cloth. He has a napkin on his knees, and in his hand a piece of ham, a slice of bread, and a knife. The old man behind is probably' WILLIAM THE DRUMMER.' He has his hat in his right hand, and in his left a gold-footed wineglass, filled with white wine. He wears a red scarf, and a black satin doublet, with little slashes of yellow silk. Behind the drummer, two matchlockmen are seated at the end of the table. One in a large black habit, a napkin on his knee, a hausse-col of iron, and a linen scarf and collar. He is eating with his knife. The other holds a long glass of white wine. Four musketeers, with different shaped hats, are behind these, one holding a glass, the three others with their guns on their shoulders. | Other guests are placed between the personage who is giving the toast and the standard-bearer. One with his hat off, and his hand uplifted, is talking to another. The second is carving a fowl. A third holds a silver plate; and another, in the background, a silver flagon, from which he fills a cup. The corner behind the captain is filled by two seated personages, one of whom is peeling an orange. Two others are standing, armed with halberts, of whom one holds a plumed hat. Behind him are other three individuals, one of them holding a pewter pot, on which the name Poock,' the landlord of the 'Hotel Doele,' is engraved. At the back, a maid-servant is coming in with a pasty, crowned with a turkey. Most of the guests are listening to the captain. From an open window in the distance, the façades of two houses are seen, surmounted by stone figures of sheep."

remember to paint the hands of the figures as they are here depicted; they are as wonderful portraits as the faces. None of your slim Van Dyck elegances, which have done duty at the cuffs of so many doublets; but each man with a hand for himself, as with a face for himself. I blushed for the coarseness of one of the chiefs in this great company, that fellow behind "WILLIAM THE DRUMMER," splendidly attired, sitting full in the face of the public; and holding a pork-bone in his hand. Suppose "The Saturday Review" critic were to come suddenly on this picture? Ah! what a shock it would give that noble nature! Why is that knuckle of pork not painted out? at any rate, why is not a little fringe of lace painted round it? or a cut pink paper? or couldn't a smelling-bottle be painted in instead, with a crest and a gold top, or a cambric pockethandkerchief, in lieu of the horrid pig, with a pink coronet in the corner? or suppose you covered the man's hand (which is very coarse and strong), and gave him the decency of a kid glove? But a piece of pork in a naked hand? O nerves and eau de Cologne, hide it, hide it!

In spite of this lamentable coarseness, my noble sergeant, give me thy hand as nature made it! A great, and famous, and noble handiwork I have seen here. Not the greatest picture in the world not a work of the highest genius-but a performance so great, various, and admirable, so shrewd of humor, so wise of observation, so honest and complete of expression, that to have seen it has been a delight, and to remember it will be a pleasure for days to come. Well done, Bartholomeus Vander Helst! Brave, meritorious, victorious, happy Bartholomew, to whom it has been given to produce a masterpiece!

May I take off my hat and pay a There, now you know all about it: respectful compliment to Jan Steen, now you can go home and paint just Esq.? He is a glorious composer |

His humor is as frank as Fielding's. Look at his own figure sitting in the window-sill yonder, and roaring with laughter! What a twinkle in the eyes! what a mouth it is for a song, or a joke, or a noggin! I think the composition in some of Jan's pictures amounts to the sublime, and look at them with the same delight and admiration which I have felt before works of the very highest style. This gallery is admirable and the city in which the gallery is, is perhaps even more wonderful and curious to behold than the gallery.

the

"Vathek," or a nightmare. At one end of that old, cold, glassy, glittering, ghostly, marble hall there stands a throne, on which a white marble king ought to sit with his white legs gleaming down into the white marble below, and his white eyes looking at a great white marble Atlas, who bears on his icy shoulders a blue globe as big as the full moon. If he were not a genie, and enchanted, and with a strength altogether hyperatlantean, he would drop the moon with a shriek on to the white marble floor, and it would splitter into perdition. And the palace would rock, and heave, and tumble; and the waters would rise, rise, rise; and the gables sink, sink, sink; and the barges would rise up to the chimneys; and the water-souchee fishes would flap over the Boompjes, where the pigeons and storks used to perch ; and the Amster, and the Rotter, and the Saar, and the Op, and all the dams of Holland, would burst, and the Zuyder Zee roll over the dykes; and you would wake out of your dream, and find yourself sitting in your armchair.

The first landing at Calais (or, I suppose, on any foreign shore) the first sight of an Eastern city first view of Venice and this of Amsterdam, are among the delightful shocks which I have had as a traveller. Amsterdam is as good as Venice, with a superadded humor and grotesqueness, which gives the sightseer the most singular zest and pleasure. A run through Pekin I could hardly fancy to be more odd, strange, and yet familiar. This rush, and crowd, and prodigious vitality; this immense swarm of life; these busy waters, crowding barges, swing- Was it a dream? it seems like one. ing drawbridges, piled ancient gables, Have we been to Holland? have we spacious markets teeming with peo-heard the chimes at midnight at Anple; that ever-wonderful Jews' quar- twerp? Were we really away for a ter; that dear old world of painting week, or have I been sitting up in the and the past, yet alive, and throbbing, room dozing, before this stale old and palpable-actual, and yet pass- desk? Here's the desk; yes. But, ing before you swiftly and strangely if it has been a dream, how could Í as a dream! Of the many journeys have learned to hum that tune out of of this Roundabout life, that drive Dinorah? Ah, is it that tune, or mythrough Amsterdam is to be specially self that I am humming? If it was a and gratefully remembered. You dream, how comes this yellow NOTICE have never seen the palace of Amster- DES TABLEAUX DU MUSÉE D'AMdam, my dear sir? Why, there's a marble hall in that palace that will frighten you as much as any hall in

STERDAM AVEC FACSIMILE DES

MONOGRAMMES before me, and this signature of the gallant

Bartholomeuswander Helst fecit 1,1648

will be at work, reviewing their lives, and passing judgment on their works. This is no review or history or criticism: only a word in testimony of respect and regard from a man of letters, who owes to his own professional labor the honor of becoming acquainted with these two eminent literary men. One was the first am

Yes, indeed, it was a delightful little holiday; it lasted a whole week. With the exception of that little pint of amari aliquid at Rotterdam, we were all very happy. We might have gone on being happy for whoever knows how many days more? a week more, ten days more: who knows how long that dear teetotum happiness can be made to spin without top-bassador whom the New World of pling over?

But one of the party had desired letters to be sent poste restante, Amsterdam. The post-office is hard by that awful palace where the Atlas is, and which we really saw.

it was.

There was only one letter, you see. Only one chance of finding us. There "The post has only this moment come in," says the smirking commissioner. And he hands over the paper, thinking he has done something clever.

Before the letter had been opened, I could read COME BACK, as clearly as if it had been painted on the wall. It was all over. The spell was broken. The sprightly lightly holiday fairy that had frisked and gambolled so kindly beside us for eight days of sunshine- or rain which was as cheerful as sunshine gave a parting piteous look, and whisked away and vanished. And yonder scuds the postman, and here is the old desk.

NIL NISI BONUM.

ALMOST the last words which Sir Walter spoke to Lockhart, his biographer, were, "Be a good man, my dear!" and with the last flicker of breath on his dying lips he sighed a farewell to his family, and passed away blessing them.

Two men, famous, admired, beloved, have just left us, the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time.* Ere a few weeks are over, many a critic's pen

* Washington Irving died, Nov. 28, 1859; Lord Macaulay died, Dec. 28, 1859.

|

Letters sent to the Old. He was born almost with the Republic; the paler patriæ had laid his hand on the child's head. He bore Washington's name : he came amongst us bringing the kindest sympathy, the most artless, smiling goodwill. His new country (which some people here might be disposed to regard rather superciliously) could send us, as he showed in his own person, a gentleman, who, though himself born in no very high sphere, was most finished, polished, casy, witty, quiet, and, socially, the equal of the most refined Europeans. If Irving's welcome in England was a kind one, was it not also gratefully remembered? If he ate our salt, did he not pay us with a thankful heart? Who can calculate the amount of friendliness and good feeling for our country which this writer's generous and untiring regard for us disseminated in his own? His books are read by millions* of his countrymen whom he has taught to love England, and why to love her. It would have been easy to speak otherwise than he did to inflame national rancors, which, at the time when he first became known as a public writer, war had just renewed: to cry down the old civilization at the expense of the new to point out our faults, arrogance, short-comings, and give the republic to infer how much she was the parent state's superior. There are writers enough in the United States, honest and otherwise, who preach that kind of doctrine. But the good Irving, the peaceful, the

*See his Life in the most remarkable "Dictionary of Authors," published lately at Philadelphia, by Mr. Alibone.