grandees, who were too much embarrassed in debt to bear the means of profiting by the machinery of bribes applied to so vast a populace, naturally wished to place the administration of public affairs on another footing; many from merely selfish purposes, like Cethegus or Lentulus-some, we doubt not, from purer motives of enlarged patriotism. One charge against Catiline we may quote from many, as having tainted the most plausible part of the pretended evidence with damnatory suspicions. The reader may not have remarked but the fact is such that one of the standing artifices for injuring a man with the populace of Rome, when all other arts had failed, was to say, that amongst his plots was one for burning the city. This cured that indifference with which otherwise the mob listened to stories of conspiracy against a system which they held in no reverence or affection. Now, this most senseless charge was renewed against Catiline. It is hardly worthy of notice. Of what value to him could be a heap of ruins? Or how could he hope to found an influence amongst those who were yet reeking from such a calamity? But, in reality, this conspiracy was that effort continually moving underground, and which would have conti nually exploded in shocks dreadful to the quiet of the nation, which mere necessity, and the instincts of position, prompted to the parties interested. Let the reader only remember the long and really ludicrous succession of men sent out against Antony at Mutina by the senate, viz. Octavius, Plancus, Asinius Pollio, Lepidus, every one of whom fell away almost instantly to the anti-senatorial cause, to say nothing of the consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, who would undoubtedly have followed the general precedent, had they not been killed prematurely: and it will become apparent how irresist ible this popular cause was, as the sole introduction to a patriotic reformation, ranged too notoriously against a narrow scheme of selfishness, which interested hardly forty families. It does not follow that all men, simply as enemies of an oligarchy, would have afterwards exhibited a pure patriotism. Cæsar, however, did. His reforms, even before his Pompeian struggle, were the greatest ever made by an individual; and those which he carried through after that struggle, and during that brief term which his murderers allowed him, transcended by much all that in any one century had been accomplished by the collective patriotism of Rome. 66 age to take off this stock on hand; but then with this cry for patronage, there is a concurrent attempt to raise, not art, but artists by the thousands; so that if we progress," and our English school of design" viget, an income tax will not provide all with a crust and porter. It may be very much doubted if the multiplication of THE Royal Academy have chosen a motto from Symmachus for their catalogue this year that may be of ambiguous sense-" Omne quod in eursu est viget." There are movements in a circle, movements retrogressive as progressive. The vitality shown in the course, the movement, is not always healthy, not always in dicative of vigour. A foundered post-artists is the advancement of art. It horse cannot keep on his legs at a quiet pace-you must spur him to the full trot or the gallop. A spent ball too, viget, yet is nevertheless a spent ball, progressing to a dead stop apparently leisurely enough, yet deadly to encounter. A newly recruited soldier in one of our battles, not be ing in the thick of the fray, saw one of these spent cannon-balls hesitatingly and slowly rolling onwards near the ranks, and to make sport, ran out to stop it as he would a 'cricket-ball, but it killed him on the spot. "Omne quod in cursu est viget," was to him an epitaph. We do not see any very just application of the line to the academicians and their works. We cannot suspect them of the extreme modesty, that they should say in it, "You see we keep moving, therefore are not defunct." And yet it is more than possible that they may have some "spent balls" among them; and some who, like the post-horse, exhibit their vitality in rapid and eccentric motions, with which public taste cannot keep pace." Symmachus" here then is nót a good "ally," as the name would import, and is rather ready to trip up the heels of friend or foe. For our part, we do most sincerely wish that our academicians would go on at a more sober pace, and not endeavour to outrun each other at all, oftentimes outrunning thereby all judgment, both their own and the world's. And while in the wishing trim we may add, that we should be better pleased if they did not admit so many candidates in the race, though many of them do happen to come with flaunty colours and ribbons flying. One thousand four hundred and nine works of art in one exhibition is a fearful number, perhaps enough to bring the arts into disrepute. And then we are told of hundreds upon hundreds rejected; and yet a general cry is raised for patronage. That is well enough, for it must require a great deal of patron encourages a taste for mediocrity, even thought of it. His reply struck us body by another art, is no small test of genius. Whatever defects Mr Maclise may have, and we think he has many, they arise not from weakness-power is his chief quality; it even makes his faults more conspicuous; and we had rather see it so ; for great and noble things may be struck off by it, and that which is now wrong, nay, false and bad, may find in him a tempering hand, and be made keep due place, and be converted into beauty. He fears no position of the human figure, his drawing is bold and true, and his grouping artistically, technically speaking, nearly perfect. If he chooses to make rules for himself, and to introduce more figures, and more evident episode than the old masters thought proper, he contrives not to lose the entirety of his subject in so doing, and so groups his figures, that, however many, they do not oppress us with a crowd, and he makes them appear essential to his story. We say not that this his rule is a good one. We wait to see what he will ultimately do with it, unwilling to admit limits and shackles unnecessarily upon genius. We believe we have spoken of the two artists that most people speak of who visit the academy this year, as giving, more than any others, or rather, we should say, tending to give, a character to our Exhibition; and therefore it is fair to give such notice of them, even before we come to make any remarks upon their particular works. Upon the whole, we do not think this year's Exhibition any improvement upon the last. Some artists that should be greatest are inferior to themselves-far inferior; and some, so few or so unimportant are their pictures, may be scarcely considered exhibitors. Eastlake has but one picture, and that a small one, and might be overlooked from its very modesty and excellence; it is, however, exquisitely beautiful. We have lost Sir David Wilkie-for it would not be fair to his name and fame to view his pictures now exhibited as specimens of his power. Poor Sir David! his was a melancholy end, just when he was in the full hopes of realizing the fruits of his travail and his travel. Nor do we in the least sympathise with Mr Haydon in his ambiguous eulogium upon his friend, in thinking it a glorious death that a painter's bones should be committed to the sazzione on art. deep sea. Such a burial might be in keeping with the life and death of a sailor whose home that element is but with the painter we associate the warm hearth, and comfortable fire gleaming upon his easel, and converHow apt are some people to exaggerate the pathetic, and think it fine, and fine feeling too, all the while being nothing more than ridiculous. Nor is exaggeration of the merits of an artist beneficial to his after fame; the strained bow re coils; we are apt to undervalue when the cold fit comes. We were never of those who thought Sir David a giant in art, and have often criticised his works with some severity; and see no reason why his death, which we lament, should excite a maudlin sympathy, or disarm criticism of truth. In this age we deal in complimentary superlatives, so that it is difficult to fix any in a true position. Sir David Wilkie was an admirable artist; but neither in design, nor manner of treating his subjects, was there conspicuous the "vivida vis ingenii." He appeared always to be cool, and to a great extent judicious, at his easel; never hurried into an enthusiasm that should take with it his subject and the spectator. Good sense, talents, and unwearied labour, from an early age led him to a less faulty style of painting than we had before seen among us. He captivated by his finish and great truth of character. Nature was at once recognised; and his arrangements were clear and artistical. We always thought him very judicious in giving a proper space for his figures to act their parts in; they did not crowd in upon the canvass; nor leave too large a space" to let." In these respects he was highly beneficial to Art; for after him, the undefined, ill-painted scenes of familiar life only disgusted. He brought this class of art into high respectability. If he was not a good colourist, he avoided offending by an unnecessary display, and this was characteristic of his judgment. He had not, however, a true and strong feeling for beauty. He would often introduce positive deformity when the beautiful would have answered the purpose of his story quite as well. In his celebrated pic. ture of the "Blind Fiddler," we do not remember one graceful, modederately graceful, figure; the boy with his mocking imitations is absolutely hideous in his grimaces; if compelled to have the picture before us, we could not resist the painting him out. In his "Rent Day," the figures are half of them deformed-the farmer at the table has a hump. back, or his shoulder is out. The "Blind-man's buff" is all hips and elbows, quite disagreeable to the eye when it has caught this peculiarity. Now, we think it should be a maxim in art to deal as much as possible in beauty-never to introduce deformity, unless the subject demands it, and then to let the manner of treating it, or the attraction of other parts, take off the unpleasantness of it. And herein the painter will often be called upon to distinguish between infirmity and deformity. Raffaele's genius was very remarkably shown in his power over the necessity of his subject; making beauty conspicuous as a whole, where some of the parts were necessarily otherwise. And even these, as we may term them, originally bad parts, how does he put upon them some mystery, or some divine operation, to which the mind is so powerfully directed, that it too is absorbed in awe and expectation to dwell upon the defect as infirmity or deformity. So it is in the figures at the "Beautiful Gate," where beauty is throughout the picture; and in the miserable cripple we fancy we see one ready to start up into strength and beauty, even such perfection of form as we see all around him. And such is the case in the demoniacal boy in "The Transfiguration." There is the awfulness of a mystery beyond human means to comprehend, and the presence of a potent evil, above human, that the great subject of the Transfiguration can alone annihilate. Now, Sir David's early practice lying in the looking for and accurate delineation of peculiarities of character, was against his natural perception of the beautiful, if it was ever much in him. We have hitherto been speaking of his earlier style, upon which, after all, his fame will rest, for he did not succeed, with very few exceptions, (one of which was his "Benvenuto Cellini and the Pope,") in the attempt to incorporate with his own the manner of the Spanish and Italian painters. There was, too, a lack of prominent object in his story. It is not enough to say, this shall represent such and such an event; what power, what feeling, is the event itself to tell? if it is nothing but pictorial device, and display of mechanical art, there is, after all, but a splendid poverty. Painters often overwork themselves, and are, in consequence, subject to hallucinations. It has often been exemplified, and fictions built upon the malady: it deserves to be treated tenderly, for it arises from overlabour in the service of mankind. It is apt to seize upon some oddity, some miscon ception, wherein the eye has ceased to be true to the judgment, but strangely caters to the hallucination. In his good word for him. And yet, though Αίματι μή χρῶσαι φεισάμενος παλάμης. Interpictures, Sir David Wilkie'smanner of representing hair must have arisen in some deception of this kind. ItWe have a right to suppose that the is even conspicuous in his head of Cellini; but the most remarkable instance of it was in the small portrait of a boy, some three or four years old, that every eye but his own thought the strangest thing imaginable. And latterly, in his portraits, the flesh was apt to be pinked up into innumerable little swellings, as if the subject were gouty. We are persuaded he required rest and recreation out of his art. This he had probably obtained; and had he lived, we should have seen these his eccentricities amended. The public, then, have great reason to regret his loss; he certainly advanced art, by removing indefinitiveness and inaccuracy, and substituting precision and clearness; so that honour will ever attend his name, and his country, Scotland, has, and ever will have, reason to be proud of him. But we would not so detract from the praise due to the artists who survive him, as some do, by lauding him as superlatively great, as if he were exclusively the English painter. Scotland may be justly proud, and more deeply grave; but with the presence of British art before us, we would say, with the author of Chevy Chase : "Now, God be with him, said our (queen,) Sith 'twill no better be;" Turner's eye must play him false, it cannot truly represent to his mind either his forms or colours-or his hallucination is great. There were a number of idolatrous admirers, who, for a long time, could not see his exhibited absurdities ; but as there is every year some one thing worse than ever, by degrees the lovers fall off; and now we scarcely find one to say a dreams of a sick poet have a dash of his genius; so it is with Turner's dreamy performances; there are glimpses of bright conceptions in them, not indeed distinetly discernible, yet they may be so perhaps to himself. They are like the "Dissolving Views," which, when one subject is melting into another, and there are but half indications of forms, and a strange blending of blues and yellows and reds, offer something infinitely better, more grand, more imaginative than the distinct purpose of either view presents. We would therefore recommend the aspirant after Turner's style and fame, to a few nightly exhibitions of the "Dissolving Views" at the Polytechnic, and he can scarcely fail to obtain the secret of the whole method. And we should think, that Turner's pictures, to give eclat to the invention, should be called henceforth "Turner's Dissolving Views." absence of landscape-composition landscape. There are but few that even pretend to be more than views. Nor has Mr Lee come up to the promise his last year's landscape gave. There is a new attempt by Creswick to represent some of the sweet scenes of green repose, of nature's river scenes, and to a great extent successful. A little composition, where nature has failed him, would have wonderfully improved some of these scenes. Mr Roberts's pictures are quite an exhi bition of themselves, and, we doubt not, would look better without the accompaniment of works of a distracting nature. He has less, this year, of the French-polish; but we still think a little more strong roughness, or dryness, would be an improvement. His execution is admirable, and his effects happy. As usual, we have to lament the |