minor circumstances, is tolerably well told. The dragon is dark, winged, coiled, and placed in the centre of the fore-ground; the principal light falls on the terrified princess, who, attired in her royal and bridal habiliments, and distracted by extreme danger, is flying from his fatal clutch: the dragon's pursuit of this beautiful victim is arrested by the Arian champion, who is tilting at him from a pie-bald charger, armed at all points, in full career, and with spear in rest. The second light, falls on the white parts of the horse, and gleams on the plate armour of the valorous knight. A gloomy sentiment pervades the scene. The whole is of a deep and solemn tone, suited to the immolation of a princess.

This picture is more elaborately and more tastefully pencilled, than are some other of this painter's works; and the landscape passages, than any painter's works of this early period, save and except Titian ; for Poussin was now but dawning. The nearer trees, indeed, are so ably generalised, yet their branching, ramifications, and foliage, are so skilfully detailed, and discover so much accurate observation, that they powerfully remind us of those in the St. Peter Martyr of Titian, which are so justly celebrated.

These are not portraits of individual trees; neither are they, although somewhat diversified from each other, specifically, either acacias, oaks, ashes, pines, or elms, or of any other well known forest trees, either of Africa, which is the proper scene of the story, or of any other clime [no date palms are among them], which shows that the Italian landscape painters from the first, set to work scholastically, and sought for the genus rather than the species, or the individual, when trees were to be introduced into their

For all former disputants had fallen before his pestiferous breath, till, at length, he met his match in the thrice valiant and renowned St. George-the champion of Arius and distressed princesses, and prime pattern of chivalry to future generations: who, if he did not shoot with a long bow, employed, on this terrible occasion, a very long spear, as Dominichino wisely opined, and as our readers may see.

Conformably to this alarming state of things, the roads and groves are here represented as being depopulated. No other human figures than those of the saint and the royal and devoted virgin, are present, near the fore-ground; and none are discoverable at a distance excepting a few, who have assembled on the city walls, to witness the impending catastrophe; and who, with held up and outstretched arms, are expressing their wonder at the champion's courage and enterprise.

In the above passage concerning the combat, we have been so far from employing the word dispute in a metaphorical, or tropical, sense, that we have, in fact, put aside for the moment, that military trope of the crusading ages, which has clothed and set forth a virulent polemic dispute, as a perilous adventure, and have substituted the literal meaning; for the legend of St. George victorious over the Dragon, when divested of its chivalric and romantic hues, is, in plain truth, nothing more than a triumphant way of displaying the issue of a celebrated religious quarrel, which took place during the earlier ages of Christianity, between the Arian and Athanasian factions. It has been allegorically represented as a romantic and picturesque adventure; but it was in itself, simply a violent polemic quarrel for supremacy,

in which the church militant, Bishop George of Alexandria-the enterprising son of a Cappadocian fuller --the rapacious monopolizer of salt, and bacon, and oppressor of the poor-is reported by his own partisans to have been victorious. Strange! and passing strange! that this cruel perpetrator of fraud and injustice, should have become the renowned champion St. George! the patron of England, Portugal, certain parts of Russia, and Modern Greece! In short, the highly honoured exemplar of Christian knighthood, throughout Europe!

The hard and enduring heart of this canonised dragon-killer, is reposited in the collegiate chapel, which bears his name, at Windsor, having been received by King Henry V. as an inestimable present, or "grete and precyous relyke," from the Emperor Sigismond of Germany. All this might well excite our wonder, had it not been the same with other human delusions, which, in the simple and sublime phrase of Eschylus,

-"A day in darkness hides:

A day to light restores."

The Athanasian heresy, was the dragon which St. George ostensibly vanquished. It had, doubtless, at the time, made considerable progress. Many had become converts to its doctrines; or, in the language of its opponents—had been devoured by the dragon. A princess was on the dangerous eve of proselytism, when the valorous polemic, armed cap-a-pie with Arian truths, boldly rode forward, joined issue, and overcame the heretical dragon, despite of his sophistries, or pestiferous breath. And as the pagan oracles had been, by the Christians, admitted and proclaimed

to have been inspired by "satanic agency," it was not difficult to identify the Athanasian heresy with the scriptural dragon; or to fable the rest of the legend, and set it forth in chivalry's romantic forms

and colours.

Since writing the above, we have perused the old black-letter legend of St. George and the Dragon, as rendered into English, and printed by that prime hero of the British press, Master Wynkin de Worde; from which we shall extract what is essential to the correct understanding of our National Gallery pictures of this romantic subject, either in treating of the St. George and the Dragon by Tintoret, or of the Sequel of the story, as more poetically rendered by Rubens. Dominichino had evidently seen, and studied from, this old legend. With the exception of the misplaced, or rather antedated, Christian church, the topography of his picture seems entirely regulated by it. We have here the city of Selene; the Libyan lake; and the distant Athanasian monastery, much as the legend leads us to conceive of them, with perhaps the Abyssinian "Mountains of the Moon," [Selene being literally the City of the Moon] which Bruce so long afterward explored,—in the extreme distance; all ably painted and justly conceived, with the exception of the Christian church, which the painter has mistakenly placed within the walls of the pagan city, before it was converted.

Dominichino's princess, beautiful in her person, is coronetted, arrayed in her bridal robes, and in her look and action is obviously, and sufficiently, under the influence of terror: but in one of the principal objects, the powers of the painter's fancy have failed

him. His dragon is too much of a theatrical, or puppet show, dragon, to inspire terror in a degree at all commensurate to the devouring of two victims per diem, and other dreadful effects, which have been ascribed to this redoubtable dragon.-Our painter has very obviously forgotten, that it required four yoke of oxen to drag away his dead carcase. The main-spring of action of his depicted tragedy, is, therefore, deficient in energy. But the aerial tones of the distant landscape, and the forms and the gloom of the fore-ground trees, are much to be praised; more particularly the lofty one which constitutes the right hand side-screen.

This picture came to the National Gallery with the Carr collection.

SAINT GEORGE COMBATING THE DRAGON.
TINTORETTO.

TINTORETTO is seen to some disadvantage in our National Gallery, as compared with his avowed prototype and master, Titian; inasmuch as we possess a carefully finished and thoroughly studied picture of the latter, and only a sort of pictorial rhapsody, hastily produced and never revised, from the pencil of Tintoretto, not one of the works on which his fame was founded.

Giacopo Robusti did not obtain the cognomen of Tintoretto, as some may suppose, from the splendours of his palette, but-from the circumstance of his father being a dyer-it was conferred on him at first as a juvenile joke; and in his riper years, he obtained the further addition of "Il Furioso Tintoretto," con