peculiar view of nature, that makes the picture. Hence his claim to the character of a professor of Art: hence his plastic power, which, in its highest attainments, it is scarcely a trope to call creative energy. It is his charmed and charming fancy, and obedient pencil, that animates the scene; a scene

"Whose body Nature is, but Art the soul:"

a scene which sympathetically imparts the loveliness of its beauties to congenial minds; so that "some shall praise the work, and some the architect," and neither party be mistaken.

The pervading sentiment of cheerfulness which we have noticed above-in short, all that the painter seemed to promise, he has faithfully and successfully performed. Accordingly, we perceive that, though the hour represented is that when the dairy-maids are blithely employed in milking their kine, the sun has manifested sufficient power to have dispelled the morning mists which so frequently shroud these low and flat meadow-lands; and that the clouds are breaking, if not into splendour, into fleecy forms, dappled colours, and cheerful promise: while the lord of the mansion, with part of his family (including an infant with its nurse, for whose health the parent may be supposed to be becomingly solicitous) have stepped forth from a side door, to inhale the early and salubrious breezes,

"And meet the sun upon the lowland lawn.”

ALLEGORIC PAINTING.

As "The Blessing of Rubens" is not the only work in the National Gallery of this imaginative kind, and as his Triumph of St. George, with other allegories, will follow it, we shall here introduce a few sentences concerning a species of painting now somewhat out of fashion; slighted, almost contemned in some quarters; but not quite obsolete.

The great Flemish painter of Lyric Allegories, has been, if we mistake not, somewhat too thoughtlessly criticised in modern times for indulging his poetic vein; but, nevertheless, we think that the painted Odes of Rubens will firmly stand the test of time to come; and that with Pilate he may briefly repel his carping commentators. "What I have written, I have written," was all that the Roman prefect condescended to reply, to those who would have quarrelled with his inscription for the holy cross.

This florid style of thinking with regard to the pursuits of painting, met with contemporaneous sanction. It is by no means necessary that all painters should think alike with regard to the fit exercise of their pencils; but even the contrary-though with liberal deference for each other's motives and practice. Rubens possessed a vivid and exuberant fancy; his habit of regarding the local energies of his art, and his peculiar style of composition, grew out of this teeming imagination; and it inflicts no forbiddal, but leaves free welcome in the exercise of theirs, to the cautious care of the painters of still life, and the colder fancies of dry matter-of-fact men. Have his

modern critics forgotten, or do they brave, what Reynolds has urged in defence of even his Luxembourg Gallery, where Rubens has mingled allegorical figures with the representations of real personages? a fault if it be a fault-from which the works before us are free. "If (says Sir Joshua) the artist considered himself as engaged to furnish this Gallery with a rich, various, and splendid ornament, this could not be done at least in an equal degreewithout peopling the air and water with these allegorical figures. He therefore accomplished all that he purposed. In this case all lesser considerations, which tend to obstruct the great end of the work, must yield and give way.

"The variety which portraits and modern dresses, mixed with allegorical figures, produce, is not to be slightly given up upon a punctilio of reason, when that reason deprives the art in a manner of its very existence. It must always be remembered, that the business of a great painter, is to produce a great picture; he must therefore take special care not to be cajoled by specious arguments out of his materials.

"What has been so often said to the disadvantage of allegorical poetry-that it is tedious and uninteresting cannot with the same propriety be applied to painting, where the interest is of a different kind. If allegorical painting produces a greater variety of ideal beauty, a richer, a more various and delightful, composition, and gives to the artist a greater opportunity of exhibiting his skill, all the interest he wishes for is accomplished: such a picture not only attracts, but fixes, the attention.

"If it be objected that Rubens judged ill at first,

in thinking it necessary to make his work so very ornamental; this puts the question upon new ground. It was his peculiar style; he could paint in no other; and he was selected for that work probably because it was his style."

But, concerning allegoric poetry, has not Sir Joshua conceded too much? Allegoric poetry is not tedious or uninteresting, where the ability of the poet is consummate, or commensurate to the occasion which calls it forth; or, not only Spenser and Mrs. Tighe— the charming Mrs. Tighe-but the great Italian poets, and nearly all poetry, would be tedious and uninteresting; for the merit and beauty of poetry resides chiefly in its analogies, or fictions, which, when they reach to personification, and are concatenated, are allegorical. What Pope calls the machinery of poems-even of those of Homer-is essentially of this kind; for it matters no more in poetry than it does in the arts of the sculptor and painter, whether we call certain figures introduced into its compositions, by the names of Wisdom, Courage, Beauty, &c., or Pallas, Mars, Venus, &c.

All the greater poets,-all those who have delighted much, and will long continue to delight—have abounded in allegoric allusions and personifications. What would Homer, Pindar, Eschylus, Sophocles, be without this element? And why, in modern times, should we reject, or frigidly, or fastidiously, under the mask of criticism, deny its use to the Grays and Miltonsthe Rubenses and Reynoldses, of their respective arts? The Reynoldses?- Yes-the Reynoldsesfor Sir Joshua has left us a capital specimen of allegoric painting, in his Tragic Muse, with her sublime attributes.

Poetry, says Aristotle, was first inspired with its soul, which is fiction, by Homer; and with that-which in painting we term allegory-the artist must, in a similar manner, animate his work. Drawing and colouring are the fruits of attention and practice; perspective springs from the geometry of optics; portraiture, from ready manual power, superinduced on a cultivated sense of vision: but that which engages--not merely our improved physical discernment, but our intellectual faculties also, must needs be of nobler nature.

Finally, we are of opinion, that it is not here-or elsewhere necessary to write a philosophical essay in vindication of allegoric painting. We think that the production of such a picture as the Blessing of Rubens should-and in fact, does-with all persons of cultivated and poetic perceptions, justify itself. The Fine Arts are sisters. To say so is itself a brief allegory. They are sisters, and are then most happy when they hold each other in sisterly embraces. Such pictures as the St. George introducing his proselyte Princess to sacred knowledge, and the rapturous expression of the good wishes of Rubens, are like those transporting lyric passages in Pindar or Gray, where the enraptured Muse of Poetry, going as it were beyond herself, becomes picturesque and musical, in the rich abundance of its vivacity, as Rubens, in the works before us, is both musical and poetic.

The advocates for the rejection of allegoric ornament, in the pursuits of Sculpture and Painting, will tell you, that it is better to represent on the monument of a hero a remarkable event of his life, than to exhibit him attended by Victory, or led on by Mars,