tracts, of general interest,) we speak on the authority of those best qualified to judge, when we give them no more than due credit for scientific accuracy, for a rich illustration of facts, for comprehensive, and often original views, and for a novel and successful application of former discoveries. Many of these have an European reputation. His medical thesis on mercury was well received at once, abroad, and his cholera pamphlet was translated into Spanish, and propagated by the authorities at Havana, during the season of the pestilence, when it was issued. At least a score of his professional articles are held in high esteem by the faculty, in Great Britain and on the continent.

Dr. Francis has, with reliable accuracy, from an intimate acquaintance with that fell disorder to which his father fell a victim, and from which he very narrowly escaped death himself, established the position of the immunity of the constitution from a second attack of yellow fever. He has written a most able paper, entitled the Anatomy of Drunkenness, the universal circulation of which would, we have no doubt, contribute in large degree to the attainment of that benevolent ideal which is the aim of the temperance societies.

At home, in one department at least, he is supremein all the delicate diseases of females; nor is he less successful in his treatment of a variety of disorders to which the human frame and constitution are subject.

THE classic comic painters of all countries are few in number. A score of masterly artists in portraiture may be enumerated for every single humorous genius in the art of design. The Flemish school, with Teniers, Ostade, Jan Steen, Gerard Douw, Brouwer, and Mieris, is undoubtedly the richest, both in number of artists and in variety of comic subjects. The Spanish school, with Murillo at the head, comes next. And although, in respect to character, expression, thought, satire and dramatic power, no one master in this department can, for a moment, be compared with Hogarth, the English school has few others to boast of. Wilkie, who approaches most nearly, was a Scotchman, as well as the great predecessor of Cruickshank, (the inimitable caricaturist of this century,) Gilray, who was the Cruickshank in political caricature of his day. Maclise is, we believe, an Irishman; and Leslie, with Newton, (delicious humorists of the school of Addison, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Irving,) delicate limners, graceful, spirited and Virgilian, displaying in their charming productions, the amenity, gentle beauties, and subtle refinements of those masters of authorship, we claim as American, partly from their early education here, and partly from their American illustrations of Irving.

The French pride themselves, and justly, on the possession of the genteel as well in painting as in style; but with all his courtly elegance, neither can Watteau be fairly considered a humorist, nor Coypel, though he has illustrated Don Quixote with so much vivacity and effect.

1851.

The paintings of W. S. Mount, one of the few American artists, that deserve to be called painters, are of a strictly national character; the pride and boast, not only of his native Long Island, nor yet of the State of New York solely, but of the whole country. Of an inferior grade, in the same department, are the pictures of Bingham, Ranney, Woodville, Edmonds, and Clonney, all of whom are subsequent to him, in point of time; and although several of their paintings are of great merit, evincing observation and study, full of character and expression, yet none of them can justly be compared, in point of equality, or with any fair pretensions to rivalry, with the comic designs of Mount.

Doctors of Law and Divinity, Judges and Bishops, can be easily created by conventions and councils, but a true humorist is worth a county of such dignitaries. What does the world. know or care about the Dutch theologians or commentators, who carried their heads high during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? But the Dutch school of art of that period is as well known as anything in Holland, to all out of it. Those dull, learned professors, who lecture on the genius of the very men, after death has made them immortal, upon whom living they would affect to look down, talk of comic. pictures as of the Ethiopian farces, as the lowest phase of intellectual effort. But how many libraries of sermons, and controversial theology, and church history, may be bought for the smallest collection of Teniers and Ostade!

Among those, too, who affect a liking for art in this walk, how few correctly appreciate it; placing the department of humorous description and comic satire below portrait and landscape, to say nothing of what passes under the style and title of history. In painting, however, as in literature, familiar history is in general far more valuable and directly

interesting than the so-called heroic phases of art. Everything depends on the artist and his mode of treatment of a subject. A great artist will make more of an ordinary scene than the inferior genius will be able to create out of the noblest materials. True, the grand style, in the hands of a Raphael, a Titian, a Rubens, is above anything of Dutch or Flemish art. We are not instituting a comparison between the divine Italians and the homely Dutchmen; rather would we oppose a first-rate artist of the actual to a second-rate painter of the ideal school. Something germane to this subject are the following remarks of Leslie, whose single authority is sufficient to decide a point of this kind. In a letter to Dunlap, he writes, speaking of Newton: "For my own part, I had much rather have been the painter of one of Sir Joshua Reynold's best portraits, or one of Claude's landscapes, than of any historical painting by Guido, Domenichino, or Annibal Carracci, I ever saw. If dramatic invention, a true expression of the passions and feelings of human nature, and a perfect knowledge of physiognomy, are to be estimated by their rarity, Hogarth was the greatest painter the world ever saw. Yet, according to the received classifi cation, his art must take a lower rank than that of his fatherin-law, Sir Thomas Thornhill, who designed the dome of St. Paul's with the history of the saint from whom the church is named." In Heine's letters we find an idea expressed so similar to this, and with such clearness, that we append it by way of corollary to the above. He is contrasting Goethe and Schiller, and in his light, fleering tone of sarcastic irony, which probes a subject as effectually as the finest serious analysis, he declares: "Those highly painted, those purely ideal forms, those altar images of virtue and morality, which Schiller has erected, are far easier to produce than those frail, every-day,

contaminated beings that Goethe reveals to us in his works. Indifferent painters ever present the full-length picture of some holy saint upon the canvas; but it requires a consummate master to paint a Spanish beggar, or a Dutch peasant suffering a tooth to be extracted, or hideous old women as we see them in the little Dutch cabinet pictures, true to life and perfect in art. The grand and fearful are of much easier representation in art than the trifling and the little. The Egyptian sorcerers could imitate many of the acts of Moses, as the snake, the blow, the frogs even; but when he did acts much more seemingly easy for the magicians, namely, brought vermin upon the land, then they confessed their inability, and said, 'That is the finger of God.'"

If any further criticism were necessary, we might add, that two exquisitely just and original critics of the present century, admirable writers upon art as well as literature, Hazlitt and Lamb, in their essays upon the works of Hogarth, have abundantly and brilliantly illustrated and confirmed this position,

A biographical sketch of the artist, whose name stands at the head of this paper, may be comprised within a brief space, the external events of his life being few, and not in any sense extraordinary. The few facts are gleaned from Dunlap's meagre notice, and confirmed on the personal authority of the artist.

The youngest of three brothers, artists, our painter, the son of a substantial Long Island farmer, was born at Setauket, Suffolk Co., Nov. 26, 1807. Up to the age of seventeen he had been bred " a farmer's boy," as he himself expresses it, and which early education sufficiently explains the character of the subjects of his art-all rural scenes of a domestic character, or, as in most cases, of out of-door scenes and occupa