the Virgin (as Titian did his violin to St. Anthony of Padua,) but made a solemn vow never to paint any but sacred subjects. His Madonnas, however, were all portraits of Maria Madelina Baldinucci. Carlo Dolce was a member of the Compagnia de San Benedetto, a very rigid congregation; he was the victim, says Baldinucci, of a pertinacious melancholy, which at times made it impossible to obtain a word from him; all his answers were sighs. On the day of his wedding, when the company were met for the ceremony, he was no where to be found. At last he was discovered in the church of the Annunziata, prostrate on the steps of the great altar, before a crucifix.

SIR JAMES THORNHILL, JOHN ELLIS HIS PUPIL, AND THE CHANDLER'S SHOP.

JOHN ELLIS, who was attached to Sir Robert Walpole, was a disciple of Sir James Thornhill, the painter. While Sir James was painting the saloon at Greenwich Hospital, young Ellis was in attendance upon his master; it was growing dark one evening, when the artist wishing to finish the subject he was treating, he sent his pupil to purchase candles. The youth not much liking his commission, wrapped Sir James's cloak about him, and imitating the gait of the owner, went with great parade to the chandler's shop for the candles, to the no small mortification of the artist, who was

accosted the next day by a number of gentlemen, offering him such or any other accommodation, rather than that he should be at the trouble of seeking it himself.

THE EARLIEST ARCHITECTURE OF ROME.

THE city of Rome, like the inhabitants, was at first rude and unadorned; the houses, agreeably to the name given them (tecta) were only a covering and defence against bad weather. They were not formed into regular streets, but flung together as chance directed; the walls were half mud, and the roofs pieces of boards. Any thing finer than ordinary was used in decking the temples; and when these began to be furnished with the statues of the gods (which was not till long after Numa's time) they were either of earthen ware or chopped out of wood. The chief ornament both of the temples and the houses, was their ancient trophies, which were trunks of trees loaded with the arms taken in war.

FUSELI'S OPINION OF ALBERT DURER.

FUSELI, in his edition of Pilkington's Dictionary of Painters, admirably says of Albert Dürer, that "He seems to have had a general capacity, not only to every branch of the art, but for every science that stood in some relation with it. He was perhaps the best engraver of his time. He wrote treatises on proportion, perspective, geometry, civil and military architecture. He was a man of

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extreme ingenuity without being a genius. He studied, as far as his penetration reached, established certain proportions of the human frame, but he did not invent or compose a permament standard of style. Every work of his is a proof that he wanted the power of imitation; of concluding from what he saw, to what he did not see; that he copied rather than imitated the forms of individuals, and tacked deformity and meagreness to fulness and sometimes to beauty. Such is his design. In composition, copious without taste, anxiously precise in parts, and unmindful of the whole, he has rather shewn us what to avoid than what to follow: in conception he sometimes had a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a glimpse. Such is the expressive attitude of his Christ in the Garden, and the figure of Melancholy as the Mother of Invention. His Knight attended by Death and the Fiend, is more capricious than terrible, and his Adam and Eve are two common models, hemmed in by rocks. If he approached genius in any part of the art it was in colour. His colour went beyond his age, and in easel pictures as far excelled the oil-colour of Raphael for juice, breadth and handling, as Raphael excels him in every other quality. His drapery is broad, though much too angular, and rather snapt than folded. Albert is called the father of the German school, and if numerous copyists of his faults can confer that honour, he was. That