of his pictures; but have since met him very often in the fashionable societies of the place. It is a singular enough coincidence, too, that Mr. Williams (for he is your namesake,) has owed scarcely less of his celebrity to his residence in foreign countries, and his choice of foreign subjects, than Mr. Allan has done. It is true, that he has long been known as an admirable landscape painter, and, I think, you must have seen some of his works in Wales, as well as in London; but it was not till last year, when Mr. Williams returned to Edinburgh, after travelling for some years in Italy and Greece, that his genius seems to have displayed itself in its utmost power. Familiar as he had all his life been with the beauty and the grandeur of mountains, lakes, and rivers, and skilful as he had shown himself in transfusing their shapes and their eloquence to his canvass-there seem to have slumbered in his breast the embers of a nobler fire, which never burst into a flame until he had gazed upon the majestic face of nature, in lands, where her majesty borrows a holier and sublimer influence from the memory of men and actions, in comparison with which the greatest of modern men, and the most brilliant of modern actions, must be contented to appear as dim and pigmy. Even Italy, for there was the scene of his first wanderings, seems to have wanted the power to call forth this hidden spark into its full radiance. It was reserved for the desolate beauty of Greece, to breathe into this fine spirit such a sense of the melancholy splendour of Nature, in climes where she was once no less gay than splendid-such a deep and touching sympathy, with the decays of earthly greatness, and the vanity of earthly ambition-such a mournful tenderness of feeling and of pencil, as have been sufficient to render him at once one of the most original, one of the most impressive, and one of the most delightful of painters.

Surely I am a lover of nature; but I confess, that pictured representations of external nature, when linked with no subject of human action or passion, have, in general, been able to produce, comparatively, but little effect upon my mind. The paintings of Claude, indeed, always affected me in the

most powerful manner; but then, I think, the idea that the scene was in Italy, and the shapes of Roman aqueducts, towers, and temples, gleaming beneath his sunny lustre, or more gentle moonlight, always entered very largely into the deep gratification I received from contemplating them. The same kind of instruments of excitement have been far more liberally employed by Williams, than by any of the great painters with whose works I am acquainted-and besides, the scenes of Greece, and the desolation of Greece, are things to my mind of yet nobler power than any of which even Claude had command. It is there I may be wrong in confessing it it is there, among the scattered pillars of Thebes or Corinth-or in full view of all the more glorious remains of more glorious Athens-or looking from the ivied and mouldering arches of Delphi, quite up through the mountain mists of the craggy summits of Parnassus, and the far off windings of the Castalian brook-it is there, that the footsteps of men appear to have stamped a grander sanctity even on the most magnificent forms of nature. It is there that Williams seems first to have felt, and it is in his transcripts of these glorious scenes, that I myself have been sensible of feeling the whole fulness and awfulness of the works of the Creator

-All this magnificent effect of power,

The earth we tread, the sky which we behold

By day, and all the pomp which night reveals.

As yet Mr. Williams has not had time to finish many pictures from the sketches he made in Greece; but, for the most part, these sketches are, in themselves, most charming pictures; for, in spite of the fierce suns which all preceding travellers dreaded and shunned as much as possible, and which no preceding painter ever braved, it was his custom to colour his sketches upon the spot where they were made. The effects which he has thus produced are so very new, that, but for the certainty one has in regard to the mode of their production, it is not to be denied, they would appear somewhat extravagant. I have wandered over all the scenes of deserted grandeur

in Southern France and Italy-but these Greek ruins make their appearance in a style of majestic splendour, for which my eyes were totally unprepared. The action of the atmosphere upon the marble seems to have been quite different here from any thing I have ever witnessed elsewhere; and this, taken together with the dazzling brightness reflected from innumerable fields of waving mustard, has thrown such a breadth of yellow radiance around the crumbling monuments of wisdom and valour, that the eye starts back at first, as if from the glare of the sun in half-complete eclipse. By degrees, however, the intense truth of the representation forces its way into one's heart, and you gaze with your hand over your eyes upon the golden decline of Athens, with the same unquestioning earnestness, as if you were transported, all at once, to one of the sunny slopes of Hymettus. I speak of Athensfor it is there surely that the artist must have felt most, and it is in the large picture he has already finished of Athens, that the spirit of the place, the Religio Loci, seems to have infused its deepest charm into the pencil of the worshipper. Before you lies a long level of green and yellow grain, broken everywhere by tufted plantations of vines and olives-with here and there a solitary oak or sycamore, lifting itself broader and browner above their underwood—in the midst of which the gigantic Corinthian columns, of what was once the Temple of Jupiter, form a resting-place of radiance half way between you and the city. The low roofs and fantastic outlines of the houses of the modern city spread along the verge of the hill, and separate it from the fore-ground; but the majestic remains behind seem to acknowledge little connection with the works of modern men, which intervene between us and their surpassing beauty. The whole brow of the Acropolis still beams with a labyrinth of splendour, which, at first glance, you could hardily suspect to be in decay-with such noble decision of outline do these yellow pillars break the sky behind them-towers, and gateways, and temples, and domes, and porticos, all gleaming together on the summit, in the same warmth of radiance that shone upon them when Pericles

walked thither to offer up incense before the new-made masterpiece of Phidias. The Temple of Theseus stands lower down, more entire than the Parthenon, but half lost in the shadow of the Acropolis. Behind, through a rich and wooded plain that stretches to the sea, the eye may trace some lingering vestiges of what once were the long walls of the Piræus. The sea itself sleeps bright and blue beyond-beneath a bright sky, where not one speck of cloud is seen to hover above the glorious landscape. Far behind lies Salamis, and farther still Ægina. In the centre of the piece, on the left hand, a small sheep-track, scarcely discernible among the mossy green, shows where once lay the high road to Marathon. To the right, close beneath where you stand, a group of Turks and Albanians are clustered together, with all the glaring hues of their barbaric splendour, by a clear small pool

"Thy banks, Cephisus, and the crystal lymph,
With which thou dost refresh the thirsty lips,

And moisten all day long these flowery fields."

What a landscape is here! how naked of men, yet how impregnated with the essence of humanity!

Τας ιερας όπως προσει

-ποιμεν Αθάνας.

And yet perhaps the view from Castri may be a still more delightful one, and fitted perhaps to kindle yet deeper emotions. Here there is no pomp of ruins, no sweep of deserted richness, nothing but a few moss-grown tablets and columns beneath our feet, and before us, the mountain of inspiration, lifting its clear head high among the clouds, far above all its sweeping girdle of rocks and pines. It was here that the religion of Greece had its seat and centre-it was from hence that the Oracle of Apollo once dictated to all the kings of Asia-and that far later, even the relics of its power were sufficient to protect its soil from the foot of the spoiler—when

The Gaul-King before Delphi lay."

The streams of Castalie glitter in the distance, and a single snow-white heifer, the only living thing in all the picture, browses upon the tall grass and wall-flowers, that spring from out the centre of the long silent sanctuary. A certain dim and sultry vapour of mystery seems to sleep upon every thing around-a dreamy mistiness of atmosphere, fit mother and fit nurse for the most fanciful and graceful of superstitions.

-In that fair clime, the lonely hersdman stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose :

And in some fit of weariness, if he,

When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,

A beardless youth, who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.

The nightly hunter, lifting up his eyes
Toward the crescent Moon with grateful heart,
Called on the lovely wanderer, who bestowed
That timely light, to share his joyous sport:
And hence a beaming goddess with her nymphs,
Across the lawn, and through the darksome grove,
(Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes,

By echo multiplied from rock or cave,)

Swept in the storm of chase, as Moon and Stars
Glance rapidly along the cloudy Heavens,
When winds are blowing strong:

The traveller slaked

His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thanked
The Naiad.-Sunbeams upon distant hills,

Gliding apace with shadows in their train,

Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly;

The Zephyrs fanning as they passed their wings,
Lacked not for love fair objects, which they wooed
With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque
Stripped of their leaves and twigs by boary age,
From depth of shaggy covert, peeping forth
In the low vale, or on steep mountain side:
And sometimes intermixed with stirring horns