BOOKS.

WALPOLE'S PAINTING TN 2111k4EANTL.

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,be' tested as a critic•in,arChy the istandied of philosophical , principles expowbded since his time, he will be reduced to a low rank. .A.aimilar -judgment may be passed upon him as an antiquarian, with- out reference -.to the more 'boatyard state of archmology in his time, from the absence of doeurnenth which have been since disinterred. It may even be added, that If WaPpOle had lived in in age of a more profoundly inquiring character, he would not have been of it. His taste might _have been purer, his viewa better founded, but the dilettante mind -would still have predominated: It is indeed probable, that the " morgue" and the sensitive character of Walpole would nof-haysallowed him to write at all, in an age iequiring more artistic learning and yl investigation into iftrprinciplea, and where the bettee-infornieditepular mind brought fccs to a severer' touchstone then-art-or archre§lbgy was exposed to in

the middle of the,Lsat century: ' , • L • BACtbia is not -a right mode of jnagine of the 'merits of Walpole in relation to art. A manannetto h great extent he estimated by the means within his Teach. In matters of knowledge he cannot learn more than viumpoesible iii his time; and unless be be a genius at once original,

comprehensive, and profound, (which no one Suspects Walpole tof haying been,) he cannot rise Very greatly beyond the opinions of his age. To the credit. of being beyond his age, Walpole, however, is entitled. Lie may -also claim the merit-of having atimulateehis age, and influenced public opinions in matters or art, perhaps more than could have been done by abetter man. Collectors whose meansivere too small to aspire do the dignity of patronage have existed at all times: Walpole's writings and example gave them encouragement and status. .They.did more than this, by calling public attention to art and making It fasinonable. His notions o the Gothic- might be puerile, and Strawberry Ilin too much in the toy-shop style for a severe taste; but he contributed to banish the pedantic scorn against the style of the middle ages that animated the modish world from the days of Louis the Fourteenth: he also set them an example of taste in pictures and furniture. He 'introduced art as it were into the house; though be left to others the task of refining it and raising it above gimcrack—indeed, a good deal had yet to be done in that direction. It may seem a contradiction in terms, but a man is not always to be measured by what he (critically) was, or even by what he may (absolutely) have done. He who sets an example, who stimulates the world to advance—and it may be, to find out his own failings and defects--iz entitled-to praise in spite of inferiority or even ill-success in his actual doings. In this view, the world at large is often juster than professional judges. The names of men are remembered who seldom succeeded in action) or whdse works are rarely read ; and some critics are puzzled to find out why it should be so. Regarded absolutely, however, Walpole's doings :in the literature of art were not altogether mean, especially if we look to .what he professed to do. In the Arfealotes of Painting, he renounced by that very title all claim to profundity or completeness, and he laid claim to no higher merit than than of arranging the eelleesiona of another man. He bought the iiiatiliscripts of Vertu ; and on his tidepage, in his preface, and by allusion through his volumes, the merit of the bulk of the mate-

rials-is ascribed to his predecessor.

"Mr. Vertue," Walpole says in his preface, "bad for several years been collect- ing materials for this work: he conversed and corresponded with most of the vir- tuosi in England; he was personally acquainted with the oldest performers in the science. he minuted down everything he heard from them. He visited every colleetinn,.made catalogues of them, attended sales, copied every paper he could find relative to the art, searched offices, registers 'of parishes and registers of wills fer births and deaths, turned over all our own authors, and translated these of other `Countries, which related to his subject. He wrote town everything be heard; Saw, or read. His collections amounted to near forty volumes, large and small: In one of his pocket-books I found a note of his first intention of compil- ing such a work: it was in 1718; he continued it assiduously to his death in 1156.. -These MSS. I bought of his widow after his decease; and it will perhaps surprise-the reader to find how near a complete work is offered to him, though the research was commenced at so late a period: I call it commenced; what little had been done before on this subject was so far from assistanoa, it was scarce of um. The sketch, called An Essay towards an English School, at the end of the translation of Depiles, is as superficial as possible; nor could a fact scarce be bor- rowed from it till we come to very modern times. In general I have been scru- pulous in acknowledging both Mr. Vertne's debts and my own. The catalogues of the works of Holler and Simon, and those of the collection of King Charles I. King James II., and the Doke of Buckingham, were part of Mr. Vertue's original plan, which is now completed by these volumes. "The compiler had made several draughts of a beginning, and several lives he had written out, but with no order, no connexion, no accuracy; nor was his style clear or correct enough to be offered to the reader in that unpolished form. I have been obliged to compose anew every article, and have recurred to the original fountains from whence he drew his information; I mean, where4t was taken from books.. The indigeated method of his collections registered ,occasionally as he learned every circumstance, was an additional trouble),asI was forced to turn over every volume many and many times, as they laid in confusion, to collect the articles I wanted; and for the second and third parts, containing between three and four hundred names, I was Induced to compose an iodine myself to the forty volumes. One satisfaction the reader will have, in the integrity of Mr. Vertu° t it eiceededbiti industry, which is saying much. No man living, so bigoted to a vocation, was ever so incapable of falsehood: be did not deal even in hypothesis, scarce in ceojecnire. He visited and revisited evert, pioture, every monument, that was an object of his researches; and being so little a slave to his own ima- gination, he was cautions of trusting to that of others. - In his memorandums he always put a quiere against whatever was told him of sespichitta' aspect; and never gave credit to it till he received the fullest. satisfaction. :Thus, whatever trittes the reader finds, he will have the comfort of kneeing that the greatest part at least are of most genuine authority. Whenever 1 have added to the com- piler's stotesj have generallytaken care to quote as religiously the source of my ,* Aneatotes of Painting in England; with some Account of the Principal Artists ; and irialdbotal Notices on other Arts. Alio, a Catalogue of Engravers who have been born or resided in England. Collected by the fate 'George Venue ; digested and published from his Original MSS. by Horace Walpole ; with Additions by the Reverend James Dallaway. A new edition, revised, with Additional Notes, by Ralph N. wornum, In three volumes. Published by H. G. Bohn. intelligence. Here and there I have tried to enliven the dryness of the subject by inserting fact8 not totally foreign to it: yet, upon the whole, I despair of its af- fording much entertainment The public have a title to whatever was designed for them: I offer this-to them as a debt; nobody will suspect that I bhould have chosen such a subject for fame."

There is somewhat of the gentleman's affected disclaimer of literary merit in these closing sentences ; and they Are not true. There is an in- terest about the Anecdotes of Painting, which the modern school, who disparage them, might not easily equal. By a skilful use of Vertue's antiquarian collections, Walpole gives unity and largeness to his subject, making it in fact the history of art in England, as well as a biographical notice of painters and their works. By this means, as well as by arranging the subject into reigns, f.-om the epoch of Henry the Eighth, he imparts a purpose aud consistency to his book, rarely found in a dictionary of lives of men who have little in common beyond their belonging to the same profession. To a mere reader, the introduction of obscure names, and of lists of pictures, will seem a fault, though the arrangement permits their being passed over. But this was a necessity of the plan. Walpole fails more in regard to omissions than 'insertions. To supply these omissions, which were partly owing to the circumstances of the author's age, was a main object of the late Mr. Dallaway's edition, as to improve

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upon Dallaway is one of the purposes of Mr. Wornuni in the present edition of Dallaway's Walpole.

The general idea of the plan must probably be shared Vertue, though Venue never could have arranged it with the breadth and effect of Walpole. The execution is entirely Walpole's own, and displays his usual excellences and defects. What the defects are we have indicated already—insufficient knowledge, superficial or rather dilettante principles of art, and too narrow or conventional. a mode of criticism. His merits are in some degree allied to his defects. Not reaching profoundness, he es- caped from heaviness or technical tedium. He ran over the surface of the history of English art, the characteristics of patrons and painters, with the fearless ease of a gentleman, and upon the whole acquitted himself well. In a catalogue of paintings, in an account of the barren facts of obscure lives, some degree of flatness is unavoidable ; but there is no more than is essential on a dead level. In the other parts, there is the free but measured opinion of the gentleman, expressed in the finished but artificial style of the age, with some of the finicalness of Horace Wal- pole superadded. Nor is his freedom confined to art. It extends to his- tory and its actors; whom he paints in the depreciatory and pointed style which a long course of selfish and insolent corruption in courts bad rendered the mode among wits and philosophers. A few portraits may be extracted, bearing the marks of Walpole's unmistakeable hand. The painter is evidently as much considered as his subject; but the idea, though tortured, is not sacrificed to the expression.

HENRY MLLE EIGHTH.

The accession of this sumptuous prince brought along with it the establishment of the arts. He was opulent, grand, and liberal—how many invitations to art- ists! A man of taste encourages abilities; a man of expense, any performers; but when a king is magnificent, whether he has taste or not, the influence is so extensive, and the example so catching, that even merit has a chance of getting bread. Though Henry bad no genius to strike out the improvements of latter ages, he had parts enough to choose the best of what the then world exhibited to his option. Be was gallant, as far as the rusticity of his country and the boiste- rous indelicacy of his own complexion would admit. His tournaments contracted, in imitation of the French, a kind of romantic politeness. In one which he held on the birth of his first child, he styled himself Cosur Loyal. In his interview with Francis I. in the Vale of Cloth of Gold, he revived the pageantry of the days of Amadis. He and his favourite Charles Brandon were the prototypes of those illustrious hethes with which Mademoiselle Scuderi has enriched the world of chi- valry. The favourite's motto on his marriage with the Monarch's sister retained that moral simplicity, now totally exploded by the academy of sentiments.

ERASMUS.

Holbein'a Mclination th drawing appeared very early, and could not fail of being encouraged in a family so addicted to the art. His father himself instructed him; and he learned besides, graving, casting, modelling, and architecture: in the two latter branches he was excellent. Yet, with both talents and taste, he for some time remained in indigence; dissipating with women what he acquired by the former, and drowning in wine the delicacy of the latter. At that time Erasmus was retired to Basil; a man tvhose lack of fame was derived from all the circum- stances which he himself reckoned unfortunate. He lived when learning was just emerging out of barbarism, and shone by lamenting elegantly the defects of his contemporaries. His being one of the first to attack superstitions which he had not courage to relinquish gave him merit in the eyes of Protestants, while his time-serving had an air of moderation ; and his very poverty, that threw him into servile adulation, expressed itself in terms that were beautiful enough to be trans- mitted to posterity. His cupboard of plate, all presented to him by the greatest men of the age, was at once a monument of his flattery and genius.

HOLBEIN AND MORE.

• Holbein was equal to dignified character: he could express the piercing genius of More, or the grace of Anne Boleyn. Employed by More, Holbein was employed as he ought to be: this was the happy moment of his pencil; from painting the author, he rose to the philosopher, and then sunk to work for the king. I do not know a single countenance into which any master has poured greater energy of expression than in the drawing of Sir Thomas More at Kensington: it has a free- dom, a boldness of thought, and acuteness of penetration, that attest the sincerity of the resemblance. It is Sir Thomas More in the rigour of his sense, not in the ' sweetness of his pleasantry. Here he is the unblemished magistrate, not that amiable philosopher whose humility neither power nor piety could elate, and whose mirth even martyrdom could not spoil: here he is rather that single, cruel judge whom one knows not how to hate, and who, in the vigour of abilities, of knowledge, and good-humour, persecuted others in defence of superstitions that be himself had exposed; and who, capable of disdaining life at the price of his sincerity, yet thought that God was to be served by promoting an imposture; who triumphed over Henry and death, and sunk to be an accomplice, at least the dupe, of the Holy Maid of Kent.

QUEEN ELIZABETH.

The long and remarkable reign of this princess could not but furnish many pportunities to artists of signalizing themselves. There is no evidence that hzabeth had much taste for painting; hut she loved pictures of herself. In them she could appear really handsome; and yet, to do the profession justice, they Seemed to haae flattered her the least of all her dependents. There is not a single portrait of her that one can call beautiful The profusion of ornaments with which they are loaded are marks of her continual fondness for dress, while they. " entirely exclude all grace, and leave no mom room for a painter's genius than ,rf he had been employed to copy an lodian idol, totally composed of hands a—nd necklaces. A pale Roman nose, a head of hair loaded with crowns and powdered with diamonds, a vast ruff; a vaster fardingale, and a bushel of pearls, are the features by which everybody knows at once the pictures of Queen Elisabeth. Besides many of her Majesty, we are so lucky as to possess the portraits of al- most all the great men of her reign; and though the generality of paintens at that time were not equal to the subjects on which they were employed, yet they were close imitators of nature, and have perhaps transmitted more faithful repre. sentations than we could have expected from men of brighter imagination.

The criticism of Walpole, like that of his age, till Reynolds arose, was deficient in what may be called the philosophy of art. He could not reach the principles on which either the essentials or the mechanicals of art depended. In all that regards the perception of educated taste, Walpole's judgment was as good as that of his successors. His mode of expressing himself may seem singular because the style is no longer in vogue ; but so would the present manner be strange to another gene- ration. His remarks on Hogarth may be taken as an example of Wal- pole as a critic. The reader may have met some of the ideas before, for Walpole's criticisms on this artist have been frequently quoted or repro- duced.

" Having despatched the herd of our painters in oil, I reserved to a class by himself that great and original genius Hogarth ; considering him rather as a writer of comedy with a pencil, than as a painter. If catching the manners and follies of an age living as they rise, if general satire on vices and ridicules, famili- arized by strokes of nature and heightened by wit, and the whole animated by proper and just expressions of the passions, be comedy, Hogarth composed comedies as much as Moliare: in his Marriage a-la-mode there is even an intrigue carried on throughout the piece. He is More true to character than Congreve ; each per- sonage is distinct from the rest, acts in his sphere, and cannot be confounded with any other of the dramatis personm. The alderman's Motboy, in the last print of the set I have mentioned, is an ignorant rustic ; and if wit is struck out from the cbaracters in which it is not expected, it is from their acting conformably to their situation and from the mode of their passions, not from their having the wit of fine gentlemen. Thus there is wit in the figure of the alderman, who, when his daughter is expiring in the agonies of poison, wears a face of solicitude, but it is to save her gold ring, which he is drawing gently from her finger. The thought is parallel to Where's, where the miser puts out one of the candles as he is talk- ing. Moliere, inimitable as he has proved, brought a rude theatre to perfection. Hogarth had no model to follow and improve upon. He created his art, and used colours instead of language. His place is between the Italians, whom we may consider as epic poets and tragedians, and the Flemish painters, who are as writers of farce and editors of burlesque nature. They are the Tom Browns of the mob. Hogarth resembles Butler, but his subjects are more universal; and amidst all his pleasantry, he observes the true end of comedy, reformation: there is always a moral to his pictures. Sometimes he rose to tragedy, not in the catastrophe of kings and heroes, but in marking how vice conducts insensibly and incidentally to misery and shame. He warns against encouraging cruelty and idleness in young minds, and discerns how the different vices of the great and the vulgar lead by various paths to the same unhappiness. The fine lady in Morriage a-la-mode, and ROI Nero in the Four &ages of Cruelty, terminate their story in blood—she occasions the murder of her husband, he assassinates his mistress. How delicate and sisperior too is his satire, when he intimates in the College of Physicians and Surgeons that preside at a dissection, how the legal habitude of viewing shocking scenes hardens the human mind and renders it unfeeling. The president main- tains the dignity of insensibility over an executed corpse, and considers it but as the object of a lecture. In the print of the Sleeping Judges, this habitual in. difference only excites our laughter.

"It is to Heger' h's honour that in so many scenes of satire or ridicule it is obvious that ill-nature did not guide his pencil. His end is always reformation, and his re- proofs general. Except in the print of the Times, and the two portraits of Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Churchill that followed, unman amidst such a profusion of characteristic faces, ever preteeded to discover or charge him with the caricature of areal person; except of such notorious characters as Chartres and Mother Needham, and a very few more, who are acting officially and suitably to their professions. As he most have observed so carefully the operation of the passions on the countenance, it is even wonderful that he never, though without intention, delivered the very fea- tures of any identical person. It is at the same time a proof of his intimate in. • tuition into nature; but had he been too severe, the humanity of endeavouring to root out cruelty to animals would atone for many satires. It is another proof that he drew all his stares fro:n nature and the form of his own genius, and was in- debted neither to-models nor books for his style, thoughts, or hints, that he never succeeded when he designed for the works of other men. I do not speak of his early performances at the time that he was engaged by booksellers, and rose not above those they generally employ ; but in his matures age, when he had invented his art, and gave a few designs for some great authors, as Cervantes, Gulliver, and even Hudibras, his compositions were tame, spiritless, void of humour, and never reach the merits of the books they were designed to illustrate. He could not bend his talents to think after anybody else. He could think like a great genius rather than after one. I have a sketch,in oil that he gave me, which he intended to engssave. It was done at the time that the House of Commons ap- pointed a Committee to inquire into the cruelties exercised on prisoners in the Fleet to extort money from them. The scene is the Committee; on the table are the instruments of torture. A prisoner in rags, half-starved, appears before them: the poor man bass good countenance, that adds to' the interest. On the other hand is the inhuman gaoler. • It is the very figure that Salvator Rosa would have drawn for Iago in the moment of detection. Villany, fear, and conscience are mixed in yellow and livid on his countenance; his lips are contracted by tremens; his face advances- as eager to lie, his legs step bail as thinking to make his es- cape; one hand is thrust precipitately into his besotn, the fingers of the other are catching uncertainly at his batten-holes. If this was a portrait, it is the most speaking that ever was drawn Of it wea not, it is still flow. It is seldom that his figures do not express the character he intended to give them. When they wanted an illusttation that colours coald not bestow, collateral circumstances, full of wit, supply notes. The nobleman in Marriage I-la-mode bass great air; the coronet on his crutches, and his pedigree Melling out of the bowels of William the Conqueror add his character. In the breakfast the old steward reflects fur the spectator. Sometimes a short label is an epigram, and is never introduced without improving the subject. Unfortunately, some circum- stances, that were temporary, will be lost to posterity, the fate of all comic au- thors; and if ever an author wanted a commentary that none of his beauties might be lost, it is Hogarth—not from being obscure, (for he never was that, but in two or three Of his first prints, where transient national follies, aa lotteries, freemasonry, and the South-sea were his topics,) but for the use of foreigners, and from a multiplicity of little incidents, not essential to but always heightening the principal action. Such is the spider's web extended over the poor 's box in a parish-church; the blunders in architecture in the nobleman's seat seen through the window, in the first print of Marriage 1-la-mode; and a thousand in the Strol- lers dressing in a Barn, which for wit and imagination, without any other end, I think the best of all his works: as for useful and deep satire, that on the Methi. dista is the most sublime. The scenes of Bedlam and the gaming-house are ini- mitable representations of cur serious follies or unavoidable woes; and the concern shown by the 'Lord Mayor, when the companion of his childhood is brought be-

fore him as a criminal, is a touching picture, and big with humane admonition and reflection.

"Another instance of this author's genius is his not condescending to explain his moral les,ons by the trite poverty of allegory. If he had an emblematic thought, he expressed it with wit, rather than by a symbol."

We have already mentioned one object of Walpole's two editors, that of supplying omissions : another was to correct errors : a third is of a larger kind, namely, to extend the text of Walpole by ampler treat- ment and more modern views. This is done in the form of appendices to such sections as require it, and in lesser cases by foot-notes. The re- marks on modern Gardening in England, the Catalogue of Engravers, and the Life of VerLue, are also added. The engravings of the portraits of various painters are not highly finished, but they convey a strong idea of the original likeness, and of the essential qualities of the painter's style. Altogether, the publication forms a handsome edition of Walpole's works on art, compressed into three full but not over bulky volumes, clothed in the modern style.