been full of amenity, pleasant humours, and confidential: "For the rest," says Pascoli, (who came to Rome while the impressions Salvator had made in its circles were still fresh,)-" For the rest, though Salvator was by temperament both sensual and sarcastic, those faults were compensated by virtues, which made them the more to be lamented, if not to be excused. For he was charitable, alms-giving, and generous; gracious and courteous; a decided enemy to falsehood and fiction, greedy of glory, eminent in all the professions to which he addicted himself, yet still prizing his talent more in that department of the arts, in which he did not excel, than in that line in which he had no competitor."

To the patent of Salvator's merit as a painter, the successive generations of nearly two centuries have set their seals, and time and posterity have long consecrated the judgment passed on his works by such contemporary critics as were not influenced by envy, nor warped by prejudice and party-spirit. The opinions of Passeri (and the disciple and worshipper of Domenichino, was no incompetent judge), of Baldinucci, of Pascoli, and of many other virtuosi of his own times, or of those which immediately followed them, are on record. The qualified eulogium of Sir Joshua Reynolds, (who, in refusing Salvator that grace which none but himself ever denied, accords him "all the sublimity and grandeur of the Sacred Volume from which he drew his subject of Jacob's Dream,") has long been before the British public; and to such testimonies may be added, the hitherto unpublished opinion of one, from whose refined taste

and superior judgment, few in the present day will be inclined to appeal-I mean the Baron Denon. In a letter to the author, this venerable Corypheus of the arts observes of Salvator, that he was "grand compositeur, dessinateur spirituel, penseur poetique, grand paysagiste, et tout-à-fait original dans ce genre; vaste et grandiose en tout. Les arbres sur le devant ont une audace pour ainsi dire impertinente, qui leur donne de la noblesse," &c.

As an engraver, he had all the originality of manner which characterized his paintings; and notwithstanding the praises which have been lavished on the execution of his etchings, the designs or conceptions they embodied were still superior to the manual dexterity displayed his touch was light, bold, and spirited though he is accused of wanting the force and energy that characterised his pencil. He never engraved any pictures but his own.*

As a musical composer, his merits must be estimated by the progress which the most charming of all the arts had made in his own times. The music of Milton's modern Orpheus,

"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song,

First taught our English music how to span

Words with just note and accent," &c.

would, in the present day, be as little palatable to an English public, as the strains of Dante's favourite

The original plates, nearly worn out, were sold by the present family to the government, for 1000 dollars, and are now in the Papal Chalcographic office. Copies were, however, piratically executed by a living artist, Rainaldi. Volpato, Strange, and Boydell, have engraved his principal pictures.

minstrel, Casseli, would be endurable to the cognoscenti audience of "the San Carlos." It is enough to establish the musical genius of Salvator Rosa,* that his compositions were pronounced by the most learned and elegant musical professor of the last century, to be "in point of melody, superior to most of the masters of his time. Of his skill in architecture, (which, however, he never practised professionally) we have only a passing observation of Pascoli, who asserts, that "he understood it perfectly."

As a comic actor, an improvissatore, a performer on many musical instruments, and (to use a French term for a talent, which, for very obvious reasons has no fit English one) as a delightful causeur, the merits of Salvator Rosa must be taken upon trust! These brilliant qualifications, which render life so much more easy and delectable, than higher talents and sublimer powers, have nothing to do with time-they belong to the moment, and are equally evanescent; but the testimony which all who witnessed these personal accomplishments of the great poet-painter, bear to their excellence, endows him with a sort of individual and characteristic fascination, which, perhaps, in the "hey

While the air of "Vado ben spesso," and others of Salvator Rosa's compositions are to be found in the elegant little musical albums of half the fashionables of London, with quadrilles by Queens, and waltzes by Duchesses, in Rome, all to whom I applied, (either personally, or through her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire, and my friend General Cockburn,) denied that Salvator ever had composed a bar: “they had never even heard he was a musician." They had probably never heard of the works of Baldinucci, Passeri, Pascoli, and other pictorial biographers, which are known and read every where, but at Rome. Two of Salvator's airs will be found at the end of this volume.

day of his life," he would not have exchanged for the immortality which awaited him, when such light and dazzling acquirements should be inevitably forgotten.

As a prose writer, (if his familiar letters, written à trait de plume, to intimate friends on intimate subjects, and never intended for publication, can entitle him to that epithet,) there is a something English and natural in his manner of expressing himself, which can only be estimated by those who are acquainted with the wretched prose style of that day in Italy, or by comparing his epistolary correspondence with the letters extant of Nicholas Poussin, Lanfranco, Domenichino, &c. In this, as in every other respect, Salvator Rosa had "devancé son siècle."

The more difficult and delicate task remains, to speak of Salvator as a poet. The Italian language had been early applied to satire, as many of the passages in the "Commedia" of Dante prove. But the vein of bitter invective of this poet, which spared neither Princes nor Popes, was succeeded by a light and jocose satire, which the talents and works of Lorenzo de' Medici, Franco, Pulci, Berni, and Bentivoglio, long continued to preserve fresh and unrivalled in popular admiration. The satires of Ariosto, with all their interest and merit, were merely personal: they reorded his own story, the blighting influence of patronage, the misery of literary dependence, the captious tyranny of pretending superiors, and the unwilling submission of proud but indigent genius! Great applause had been won by Baldovini for his "Lamento di Cecco da Verlunga," written in "La lingua Contadinesca," or rustic dialect; and Della Cruscan cri

tics had crowned Menzini as the prince of Italian satirists, of the seventeenth century.

But these writers, though named satirists, scarcely ventured beyond jesting lightly with the lighter follies of mankind. They brought nothing of that deep feeling and philosophic spirit to bear upon their task, which distinguished the works of the painter-poet of Naples; and that poet was the first to attack the institutions of the corrupt society in which he lived, and to stigmatize the false conclusions and vicious modes they originated in all the relations of life. Indignant at the obstacles which mediocrity threw in the way of his own consciously-merited success, he scorned to palter with the littleness of the age in which he lived; but fell as recklessly on the crimes of the great, as on the pretension and servility of the tribe of painters and poets, who wrote or daubed down to the level of their ignorant and vain-glorious patrons. Of a burning and energetic temperament, a true child of liberty, he was impracticable to all restraint. Writing rather from his passions than his head, he poured forth his verses in the abundance of his teeming ideas, not only regardless of the pedantic rules and academic refinements of his own particular age, but too frequently even negligent of that indispensable correctness of style and selection of phrase, which the best ages of literature, in all countries, have rigidly and properly exacted from the master-geniuses they have produced. The satires of Salvator, resembling the poetry of Machiavelli more than that of any other Italian writer, are more remarkable for their depth of thought and vigour of expression, than for their grace or harmony;