whom learning is not rendered a most irksome and detested slavery, and who do not leave the establishment with a firm resolution never again to open a book from the moment of their emancipation! Is this necessary?—is this desirable? and if not, can it be remedied? These are important points for the consideration of parents. Thank Heaven, I have no children to educate; and thank Heaven again, I have left behind almost the recollection of that always envied, always praised epoch, of childhood, from which all are so happy to escape: an epoch of feebleness, helplessness, ignorance, close restraint, and subjection. I would not undergo it again, to be born heir to a Dukedom. C. M. THE FLOWER THAT FEELS NOT SPRING. FROM the prisons dark of the circling bark The dormouse starts from his wintry sleeping; To light and life from the darkness leaping; I laid in the bosom of earth a blossom, And water'd its bed with a father's tears, Such as angels shake from their sunny wings,- As the matin ray of the god of day Brightens the dew which at last it dries : Yes, Fanny, I cannot regret thy clay, When I think where thy spirit has wing'd its way. So wither we all-so flourish and fall, Like the flowers and weeds that in churchyards wave; Our leaves we spread over comrades dead, And blossom and bloom with our root in the grave ; Springing from earth into earth we are thrust, Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust! If death's worst smart is to feel that we part It softens his sting to know that we wing Our flight to the friends who have gone before, If it waft me, O Fanny, my daughter, to thee! H. BRITISH GALLERIES OF ART.-NO. VI. LET those who would see this delightful collection to the best advantage, choose for their visit to it a fine sunshiny day-in winter. Let them, as they wind along the hard ringing road from Championhill to the pretty village in the centre of which the College is situated, (I am taking it for granted that they will choose to walk the latter part of the way), let them observe the trees, denuded of their green attire as if purposely to form a study for the artist and the lover of nature, spreading forth their thousand branches against the cold gray skytheir solid trunks (alike in summer and winter) rising from the green earth like pillars, and here and there wreathed with the clasping ivy, that gives ornament in return for support;-let them, as they pursue the gracefully winding and picturesque road that leads to the village, watch (through the unclothed hedgerows) the various changes in the prospect on either hand-which they cannot do in summer, and which would scarcely look more lovely if they could let them listen to the low call of the robin-redbreast, as he flits pertly from the road-side at their approach, or sings wildly sweet as he perches himself on the topmost twig of yonder thorn that has been suffered to outgrow the rest of the close-cut hedge;-finally, let them, as they arrive at and are about to enter the Gallery, turn to the little upland that faces it at a short distance, heaving its green bosom into a gentle sweep, and looking as bright and happy beneath the winter sun as it does beneath the summer. The reader must not think that I am heedlessly calling upon him to attend to these objects of external nature, instead of leading him at once to those of which we are more immediately in search. I have purposely asked him to fix the former on his memory, and to yield himself for a moment to their influence exclusively, in order that, by a pleasing and not abrupt contrast, he may be the better prepared to appreciate the blush, the bloom, the burning glow of beauty that will fall upon his senses from the rich summer of Art that greets him on his entrance to this exquisite Gallery: for whatever season may obtain without, within these walls a perpetual summer reigns, and diffuses its sweet influence through all that come, in virtue of those exquisite works of the Flemish landscape-painters which form the staple of this collection. Not that it is without many most choice and a few invaluable specimens of almost all the other classes of the art; but the landscapes of Cuyp, of Both, of Wouvermans, of Wynants, of Ruysdael, &c.-but particularly those of Cuyp-are its distinguishing features. To describe a landscape, even of Claude or Cuyp, is but to offer the reader Nature at third or fourth hand; for, though these works themselves are in many instances, as objects of direct sight, as good as the scenes they represent, yet any description of them can never be made so. In fact, no description of them, as pictures can be given: any attempt to do so must end in being a description of a natural scene; and this is not what is wanted, generally speaking. I shall therefore endeavour, instead, to point out a few of the distinguishing characteristics of the artists whose works I am alluding to; and then refer to such of their works in this Gallery as seem calculated to illustrate my meaning. ALBERT CUYP is incomparably the finest among the Flemish landscape-painters, with the exception of Paul Potter. There is a simplicity, a purity, and a truth of character about his best works, which none of his other rivals were capable of reaching; and there is, at the same time, not only an absence of all the faults, but a union of nearly all the merits, by which those rivals were distinguished respectively! Cuyp has all the delicious warmth and elegance of Both, without that feathery lightness of touch in the details which so frequently takes from the natural effect of his scenes. He has all the sweetness of Wouvermans, without his finical and affected niceness; all the brightness of Wynants, without his patchy, fluttery, and undecided mode of handling; and all the elegance and neatness of Berchem, without that insipid and mawkish manner which dilutes even the best results of his efforts. Cuyp must have possessed incomparably more imagination than any other Flemish landscape-painter, or than all the others united; for, though he appears rarely to have strayed beyond the suburbs of his native town of Dort, he has, by the aid of an extremely limited number of objects of study that he met with there, created scenes of the most chaste and exquisite beauty, unlike any thing that he could have seen, and yet consistent with nature and with themselves in every particular. He seems to me to have conceived these scenes in his mind in the first instance, and (so to speak) finished them there, and then to have as it were breathed them on his canvass, almost without the aid of his pencil-so sweetly clear, delicate, and ethereal some of them are. I now allude in particular to two or three in this collection. Number 3, in the first room, is an open country, with a broken foreground, bare of trees, two cows and two men in the centre, and distant hills; and yet there is a fascination in the effect of it that is indescribable. It seems all-cattle, men, ground, hills, clouds, and all-made of woven air and sunshine. There are no marks of the pencil about it. You cannot tell how it got there,—unless, as I before said, it has been breathed there. And you cannot be sure that it will stay before you that it is not an illusion of the mind-a vision of the golden ageand that when you take your eyes off it, it will not, when they return, have disappeared. I confess that this, and two or three others of the same kind in this collection, give me a more apt idea of the golden age of the poets than all the classical works expressly intended to typify it even those of Claude and Poussin themselves; and this notwithstanding the perfect truth of the details introduced into them, and above all, the rude and altogether modern character of the figures, and the dresses they wear.-No. 18, in the same room, is another delicious example of what I mean. It is a landscape consisting of two departments, divided from each other by two of those rich and elegantly-foliaged trees that Claude so frequently ran up in the centre of his pictures. The right-hand department is a secluded spot, shaded from the sun by light foliage, with a pool of clear water to make it still cooler-and two silent fishers to make it still more silent; while the left is all open, stretching away into the distance, and misty with heat, the distant mountain seeming to quiver through the mist, as objects do that you see beyond an open space of sand or earth from VOL. V. No. 30.—1823. 72 which the heat is rising; while over the mountain's head a few fleecy clouds are hovering, as if they loved it, and longed to rest upon it. In the front of this portion of the picture there is a sunny road that leads you away towards the distant hills, but leaves you in the midst of the scene before you reach them. This is a lovely picture, and much more elaborate than the preceding one (No. 3); but there is not that mysterious character about it which I seem to feel in the other. You can remember every part of it, and think of them separately; but of the other you can only remember the general effect.— No. 26 is another of these charming works-much smaller that the two preceding ones, more regularly and what may be termed correctly composed, according to the rules of art, and more delicately pencilled than even No. 18. In other respects it is of the same character with them, and steeped in the same sunny tone of colour; but its smallness prevents it from producing the effect that they do, by giving it a sort of prettiness. You are admiring the difficulty that has been overcome in producing it, instead of feeling its effects as a reflection of natural objects. This latter quality is, in fact, the grand objection to all very small highly finished works of this kind: you think more of the workman than the work-which is always a bad sign, as it respects the former. There are three more of a similar description, and almost as fine as the foregoing-Nos. 68, 72, and 83. In fact, those who would study the style of this most delightful artist, can in no single gallery in the world, perhaps, do so to such advantage as they may here. Here are no less than eighteen of his pictures, including specimens of all his different manners; and some of them are unrivalled. Next to Cuyp (omitting Paul Potter for the present, as there are none of his works here of sufficient importance to be offered as illustrations of what I might have to say respecting his peculiar style)— next to Cuyp, commend me to Both-JOHN BOTH, who did for Italian scenery almost what Cuyp has done for Flemish; with this difference, that Both found the beauty created to his hands, while Cuyp half created it himself. In Both we have a remarkable and interesting example of the effects resulting from the curious truth and industry of a Dutch eye and hand, when employing themselves on the lovely scenery and beneath the delicious skies of Italy. The contrast he felt between the cold flatness and tedious monotony of his own country, and the rich, bright, and ever-varying scenes of that in which he was sojourn ing, (for Both studied and painted for many years in Italy) seems to have kept his mind in a perpetual glow of delight, which has diffused itself over all his works. This is the characteristic of them-the fault, if the critics will have it so. They are even more warm and sunny than Italian nature itself; for to the real atmosphere through which he saw them he seems to have superadded an imaginary one of his own, formed by the glow of an admiring love. The real fault of Both, and his only fault, is one which probably arose from his Dutch education, acting on what I must venture to call his Dutch nature. He is too nice and literal in his execution. The leaves of his trees, for example, do not look like leaves, precisely because they are like them. To satisfy his conscience for what he, perhaps, considered as the too great attention that he in some instances paid to effects, he in other instances paid too much to causes. He would, in order to produce a general effect, steep a whole set of objects in the very essence of sunshine, and make all the air about them glow and glitter with it; and then, when his picture was complete, he would run up in the middle of the foreground, from top to bottom, a thin straggling tree, every leaf and twig of which he would make out distinctly, so that you might count them. This gives a poorness of effect to many of his scenes, and greatly detracts from the general impression they would otherwise produce; for generals and particulars cannot be made to consist together in this way. It is true, that Claude finished exquisitely, and yet it is his general effects that we admire him for. But the case is different. Claude produced the truth of his general effects by means of the truth of his details; and his details are all equally true, and therefore none of them attract particular attention away from the rest, and exclusively. His scenes look like Nature, because they are like it; while those of all other distinguished landscape-painters look like nature in spite of their being unlike it. But, however this may be, certain it is, that the straggling and unhealthy, and indeed unnatural-looking trees that Both so frequently runs up over his landscapes, as if for no purpose but to intercept our view of them, produce a very equivocal effect. Let the spectator compare any one of his works in this collection, having a tree in it of this kind, with the landscape by Cuyp which I first noticed (No. 3), and he will see at once what I mean. do not deny that in some instances the stratagem is good, where it is used to break the monotony of those large pieces of rock which Both so often introduces with such fine effect; but then he is never content with making them perform this office alone, but scatters them all over his delicious skies, which cannot be too much seen, too open and un interrupted. This Gallery is not near so rich in the works of this, upon the whole, delightful master, as in those of the preceding one; but there are several very charming specimens. No. 184, a sunset, is, I think, the best. Next in merit to Both, though in a totally different class from his, and indeed from all other painters stands PHILIP WOUVERMANS. As the value of all other landscapes arises from the nature they display, so I would say (if it would not sound paradoxical) that the value of Wouver mans' landscapes consists in the art. His pictures are like nothing but each other. They are perfectly gratuitous works of art. And yet we love them almost as much as we do nature; and with the same kind of love. Place one of Wouvermans' best landscapes by the side of one of Paul Potter's, both professing to represent the same class of scenery -and then determine whether, being, as they are, unlike each other in every particular, they can both be like nature. And yet both affect us nearly in the same manner, and nearly in the manner that nature affects The truth is, Wouvermans was a man of genius, and has invented a nature of his own, which is so lovely in itself, and at the same time so much in the spirit of the real nature which he imitated (not copied), that we not only permit but admire in him what in a man of inferior talent had been a mere impertinence. His pictures are, to the scenes they profess to represent, what a delicately finished enamel miniature of a human face is to the face from which it was copied; that is to say, exactly like in every individual feature, so that you can tell at once from whom it was copied, if you know the person, but exactly unlike us. |