afraid it has happened here. Allan has long been a favourite of ours, he is fond of nature, is a close observer, has a touch of the poet in him, and, moreover, deals in scenes of eastern loveliness, which excite new sensations, and are therefore welcome. The conception of his picture of "Lord Byron reposing in the house of the Turkish fisherman, after having swam across the Hellespont," is very good; the execution is, in some parts, faulty. The principal personages, namely, Byron, and the fisherman and his wife, are not dealt with in the spirit of the law, regarding fore-grounds and back-grounds; the back-ground is finished with care, but the fore-ground wants boldness and depth; the figures are too shadowy; the defect may easily be amended. We like the Highland scenes of Landseer; we wish, however, that he would give us something more of human nature, and less of his dogs and his deer. The Scottish history abounds in subjects fit for his pencil. We would advise him to paint an old Highland hunting, where the whole wild deer of the district are driven into a circle by the gentlemen and ladies of the land, and destroyed or captured in detail. We would advise him to paint also

"A damned Exciseman in a bustle,
Seizing a still."

The subject is a fine one, and worthy of him or Wilkie.

"The Maid of Judith waiting outside the tent of Holofernes, till her mistress had consummated the deed that delivered her country from its invaders," by W. Etty, R.A., has been censured and praised by critics of skill and reputation. It has the fault of all the artist's historical works, inclining to be heavy in its figures, and vulgar in its sentiment. There is, however, much vigour both of drawing and colouring, and altogether the scene is deeply impressive. We have heard this young Academician praised for the poetry of his conceptions; he is certainly a bold adventurer in subjects, but his poetic wing is weak. We shall have the whole Royal Academy against us for this heresy; let us, therefore, speak up. He is fond of subjects of heroism and deeds of daring-do; and how does he handle them? If two of his warriors contend, their swords are reddened from point to hilt, their persons are bloody from spur to plume, and gore is spouting from their gashes; it is a scene of butchery, but not the strife of heroes. They excite horror, but warm us not with sentiments of nobleness; we are sickened at the sight of carnage: the artist who practises in blood must have studied in the shambles. Etty has many high qualities, and we hope he can listen to good counsel; let him make his human creatures less brawny and muscular: elegance of shape and beauty of proportion belong to strength, and should never be absent from any action of a poetic or historic kind. Muscle is not mind, and colossal amplitude of body does not necessarily imply the heroic. Let him be sparing, too, of wounds and blood, if he desires to be truly poetic.

Leslie and Newton, two stars of America, and bright ones, have some moving and amusing works, worthy of any school and of any name. Indeed we consider them as two of our chief painters, and it is but justice to say that they have purchased their reputations by productions of singular beauty, and of a very varied nature. The former has a scene from Tristram Shandy, embodying these words, "I protest, madam, said my uncle Toby, I can see nothing whatever in your eye.' 'It is not in the white,' said Mrs. Wadman. My uncle Toby looked with might and main into the pupil." Now an ordinary artist could have made nothing of this; he could not for his soul have painted a calm innocent being, like my uncle Toby, looking into the dark of a dangerous eye, without committing one or both of the parties; Leslie has committed neither. We never saw the sense, the perilous sense of an author, so well embodied. "Falstaff's dinner at Page's house," by the same hand, though a fine picture, is less to our liking. Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page, indeed, are sly and laughter-loving dames,

and Slender and Shallow are men of worth and parts; Falstaff himself is nothing like so happy. The pen of the poet has proved too vigorous for the pencil of the painter. We see the knight shining in wit and humour, and in all manner of enjoyment, through a succession of scenes, in the great dramatist, and gathering his character and our notion of his person from all, we look on the painter's Sir John enacting one part only, and are disappointed. We have often seen in imagination a satisfactory body, but we never could imagine a satisfactory head to Sir John Falstaff, and believe no such wonder can be painted. The pictures of Newton are in their nature serious, nay solemn; but his pencil is equal to either humour or gravity. "Lear attended by Cordelia and the physician," is more worthy of Shakspeare than some half dozen pictures in the boasted gallery which bore his name. Cordelia is all tenderness and melancholy grace; she seems to live and think. The picture of "Portia and Bassanio," from the Merchant of Venice, is scarcely less successful; there is a warmth and lustrous beauty of colouring about both, not common in works of art. We wish Mulready would think of some subject more worthy of his pencil, than boys blowing their little cockleshell boats along a ditch, which he humorously calls a sailing match. He has fine powers; no one can express human emotion better. Let him think of his fame.

We have mentioned such paintings as pleased us most, and have no room for many worthy not only of notice but of praise. We will ere long bestow a separate chapter on the productions of those artists not belonging to the Royal Academy, though some of them exhibit there; they are a numerous and, in many instances, a meritorious band. In mercy, too, for men advanced in years, we withhold our strictures from those miserable daubings, scriptural and poetical, which hang so conspicuously on the walls; nor shall we pause upon the numerous architectural designs, further than to observe that little of the genius of our island has yet found its way into our public buildings. We are not prepared to say that, with all their merits, the paintings this year are the best we have seen, or any thing like it. There is less indeed of portraiture, an unlooked-for blessing, for we never could hope to lose conceit of our looks; but then there are fewer pictures of a high and commanding nature than we remember on some occasions, and there are too many bits of landscape, unworthy of the brush; snatches of domestic character, unfit for the easel; too many cows and horses, and prize oxen and full-fed pigs. When writing of our landscapes, we had our pen moist with ink to say something of Constable's "View of Salisbury Cathedral," and passed it by, lest we should say what might touch too deeply the feelings of a very meritorious artist; it is certainly a singular thing, startling at first and unnatural in its looks, from being unlike aught in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, yet a most singular work withal, and not soon to be forgotten. The conception is noble, the arrangement fine; the living life in true keeping with all around, and nothing is wanting to make it universally pleasing, but a more natural colouring both for earth and air. The clouds seem to be pouring down rain of a plum colour, plentifully speckled with flakes of snow. Turner's fire and Constable's rain,—but we shall avoid all further severity concerning painting, and make our way to the sculpture.

We descend to the Shades-into that dark room where the defects and the beauties of sculpture are alike concealed: and as, in the present arrangement, the "Satan" of Milton, a colossal ogre, stands in the middle of the place, the name and the obscurity remind us of that sublime description of a place of exhibition scarcely more dolorous.

Near to the glimmer of two little darkened windows, the members of the Academy have drawn up in close array their own works, and those which they

most admire, leaving the dim and obscure region behind to the more youthful labourers in plaster and marble, who toil on in the hope of the accidental notice of the critic, and the random liberality of the purchaser. The names of Chantrey, Westmacott and Baily, are sufficiently well known to the world; and when we say that the first has busts of the King and the Duke of Sussex, we need not add that they surpass all works beside them of a similar kind; when we say that the second has a female statue in marble, we need only say that it is equal to his other productions; and when we relate that the third exhibits a groupe of a mother clasping and caressing her children, we need not add how graceful and how natural the whole looks. We rather choose to leave these Academicians alone in their glory, and address ourselves to the works of men, with and without names, in which we recognize the presence of poetic thought and original feeling. Works of that kind we are glad to observe rather abound; the vulgarities of life appear horrible in an art which lives by fine shape and by beautiful sentiment; and in all the range of the productions of the chisel, nothing is so glorious as nature in its naked unattired majesty. Splendour of dress, rubies, sapphires, and all manner of precious stones, go for nothing in this severe and dignified department of art. We are also glad to observe that subjects are sought for, and found, in our own poetry and history more than formerly; that Apollos and Venus's are giving place to matters of more modern concernment, and that domestic life supplies groupes and figures of a beauty worthy of the finest art. "The Nymph going into the Bath," is a natural and a lovely thing, finely conceived, and delicately executed; the artist, Wyatt, resides for the present in Rome; he has studied to some purpose. It is singular enough, that one of the numerous sketches of Chantrey, made at least ten years ago, is in every respect the same as this work by Wyatt; the same posture, the same sentiment, and the same in every thing. Gibson, another Englishman residing in Rome, has "A Nymph untying her Sandal." The workmanship is exquisitely fine, and the expression good; the posture is, however, forced a little, the line of the back is interrupted or rather broken by an effort, surely needless, in an action so gentle as that of unfixing a sandal—we are aware that the posture is natural, but there is an elegant as well as a vulgar nature; the lady sets out her back too much for the line of beauty; the defect is soon forgotten in other excellencies. Gott, the third Englishman, now in Rome, has given us "A Boy and a Dog," natural enough, and well enough carved, but too homely in its sentiment for sculpture. Less beautiful in form, and ruder in execution, but surpassing all we have named yet in nature and sentiment, is Sharp's "Boy and the Lizard." He is lying sunning himself naked on the bank of a stream in which he had been bathing, when a lizard comes towards him through the grass; he mistakes it by the rustling of its motion and the glittering of its eye for a serpent, and starts alarmed. Rennie, nephew to the great civil engineer, a young artist who studied some time in Rome, has a groupe of "Cupid and Hymen;" a work of great promise, skilfully executed, but, in its sentiment, unsuitable for sculpture. That

"The breath of Love revives the nuptial torch,"

we are willing to allow, but then we allow it metaphorically; we call to mind the joys and woes of wedded life, and those times when we permit ourselves in our sternest moods to be wiled into fresh endearments, by the gentle and winning breath of her we admire. But this irresistible blandishment is one thing, and Hymen holding a link with a chubby boy blowing upon it, till his whole face is bulged out like that of a god of winds, is another. The action is perfectly natural we admit; but then the nature of the action distorts, and renders hideous that very beauty and grace, in which so much of the charm of sculpture consists. We would not have said one word on this subject, had we not felt that Rennie has poetry, a scarce article in art, about him, and that his defect here

lies in the choice of subject rather than in the mode of execution; we have no wish to depress a fine spirit, he will do something more worthy of himself some future day. Among all our sculptors, no one has made more progress of late than young Westmacott, son of the Academician of that name: we once imagined him a little stiff, both in design and in workmanship; his stiffness is relaxed into an easy and natural grace, and his workmanship has become soft and fleshy. Those who look at his marble relief of "Venus carrying away Ascanius," and his groupe called "Mischief," will, if they knew him a year or two ago, agree to what we say. Thomas Campbell, a name endeared to us by many a moving song, has tried his hand in marble, but this is visibly not the Campbell of "Hohenlinden" and "Wyoming," but one of a soberer mood in poetic things; still, though he be Campbell the less, he has done some works not unworthy of the name. We wish him so well, however, as to wish that he would shun, as he would the doors of death, all portraits of ladies enacting the Muse. Why, if we were to summon together all the beauties of the nation, we would not find one worthy of ranking with that inspired shape, that spiritual sentiment, known by the name of the Muse.

The statues and groupes in plaster, are equally numerous and respectable as those in marble; the dull opaque material, however, looks poor, compared with the lucid beauty of stone. We have with difficulty refrained from discussing till now, the character of the "Satan" of Nichols, it is a work of colossal altitude, of much study, of great labour, but, as compared with the majestic Fiend of Milton, an utter failure. It is in vain to prove to us by compasses and by rule, that all the proportions required by art have been complied with, that he has taken his posture from the poet, and his details of the body and the limbs from living nature; we may admit all this, and what then? why, marry this, he has neglected to stamp his fiend with the angelic majesty of the superior Devil of Milton; for sublimity he has given us gigantic height, and for the resolution of despair, the muscular common-place of passion. When we are in a stern mood we may as well turn to "The Serpent tempting Eve," of E. G. Physick. Why will men with no poetry in their souls, and with no sense of delicacy in their minds, meddle with subjects of such solemn beauty, and such loveliness akin to heaven as this; the workmanship is not amiss, but we have no patience to point to subordinate beauties. What is this "Vertumnus," a statue by Bubb, and in marble too? there are carved staffs with satyrs' heads for handles, with more humanity about them than this. Turn we to something which we can praise, without going grovelling over the belly of our conscience. That "Sleeping Infant," by Weekes, is not without nature, and a sort of slumbering grace, for what is so graceful as infant sleep; that alto relief too of "The Folly of the Centaurs at the Wedding of Hippodamia," has a kind of antique beauty about it which is creditable to Pitts. "The War in Heaven," by Arnold, we tried to like, but we are not well acquainted with the sort of strife waged between angels, and were obliged to shake our head at the artist's audacity, and leave him. "The Husbandman," by Rossi the Academician, will not reconcile us to the sad insult he offered to our martial feelings in the statue of the gallant Elliot, Lord Heathfield, which may be seen standing on its pedestal in St. Paul's, with all the elegance of a drunken sentinel. "The Infant Moses" is a work of some labour, and by a new name, Nixon; the statue of "A Boy giving a Bird drink from a cup," by Macdonald, is in conception belonging to poetry, and the same may be said of the "Girl caressing a Child," by Heffernan, a very pretty groupe, very natural, and also prettily modelled. We have omitted some names marked for approbation, but we cannot find room for such swarms of exhibitors as appear in the catalogue.

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There are some sixty and odd busts, one half of them at least in marble, and most of them exhibiting tokens of skill and even of talent. The next-best to the busts of Chantrey are those by Behnes; and of his, the one most to our liking

is the child of Agar Ellis; the Countess of Sheffield, too, is a fine work. We have no sculptor to rival Behnes in his female heads; there is a lady-like grace, and a staid simplicity about them, which is very becoming. Haskoll is a new name to us; artists have generally very odd names, and this is one of them. Odd or not, he has made a very capital bust of the son of Colonel Jones; no doubt the young man has a fine head, but we know how difficult it is to impress on a work of art, the graceful beauty of youth: we must keep an eye upon this same Haskoll. The bust of Mrs. Brougham, sister to Robertson the Historian, and mother to the Lord Chancellor, by Macdonald, has not a little of the keen intellectual look of her illustrious son; the Chancellor himself, by Baily, is not so much to our liking; in truth his Lordship's head, full of wit and humour, and all manner of knowledge, as it is, is better adapted for the head of the state than for sculpture : it has pleased God to give him talents of the first order, but to withhold personal beauty. We are afraid that the maxim of Flaxman, that the noblest soul was always provided with the loveliest lodging, must be considered only as a pretty piece of imagination. Fletcher-we are glad to see names of a gentlemanly aspect appearing in the ranks of art-Fletcher has a bust of the Duke of Argyle, a first bust we believe, and we have seldom seen so good a beginning. Rennie, too, has a good vigorous head of the eminent Danish Sculptor, Thorwaldsen; we have not seen any of his busts before. There is one of Clint, the painter, by Behnes Burlowe, which we can conscientiously praise as an admirable likeness. On the whole, the sculpture, particularly the works of the students, surpasses any recent exhibition; there is more poetry, more nature, and more science than we remember to have seen.

THE TWO MUNCHAUSENS.

BY A VETERAN.

IN the late Regiment of Light Dragoons, were two worthy persons, who were denominated the regimental liars: a distinction to which, giving every man his due, they were eminently entitled. The great and fundamental requisites for accomplished lying, I conceive to be a good memory, a fertile fancy, a ready wit, fluency of speech, and a brazen countenance, so that you shall tell a man a most bare-faced falsehood, and afterwards adduce such connected proofs as especially characterize actual facts. The following dialogue is a specimen of the talents of the afore-mentioned mendacious personages. C." See a man walk after he was shot dead! so have I, a whole day's march."

B.-"Come, come, that's stealing a march on our senses. No, no, it wont do: that's a naked one; do pray turn them out with some kind of probability covering over them."

C.-"What, doubt my veracity!"

B." Not for the world; that would be illiberal and unkind, and by the way, now I think on it, I believe the possibility of a man travelling without his cranium, for at the battle of Laswaree, during that desperate contest for British India, I saw a sergeant of the seventy-sixth shot dead; yet the fellow pursued his antagonist some hundred yards afterwards, threatening vengeance on the miscreant for having robbed the service of one of its best men. Finding himself weak from loss of blood, he deliberately unscrewed his head, threw it violently at the foe, and took him on the spine; down he tumbled; the veteran jumped upon him; fearful was the struggle; chest