purpose. Art is comparatively weak and incongruous, being at once a miniature and caricature of nature. We grant that a tolerable sketch of Arthur's seat, and the adjoining view, is better than Primrose Hill itself (our favourite Primrose Hill!), but no pencil can transform or dandle Primrose Hill into a thing of equal character and sublimity with Arthur's seat :—a concession which gives us some pain to make.

We do not recollect a more striking illustration of the difference between art and nature, in this respect, than Mr. Martin's very singular, and, in some things, very meritorious pictures. But he strives to outdo nature. He wants to give more than she does, or than his subject requires or admits. He sub-divides his groups into infinite littleness, and exaggerates his scenery into absolute immensity. His figures are like rows of shiny pins; his mountains are piled up one upon the back of the other, like the stories of houses. He has no notion of the moral principle in all art, that a part may be greater than the whole. He reckons that if one range of lofty square hills is good, another range above that with clouds between must be better. He thus wearies the imagination, instead of exciting it. We see no end of the journey, and turn back in disgust. We are tired of the effort, we are tired of the monotony of this sort of reduplication of the same object. We were satisfied before; but it seems the painter was not,

and we naturally sympathise with him. This craving after quantity is a morbid affection. A landscape is not an architectural elevation. You may build a house as high as you can lift up stones with pulleys and levers, but you cannot raise mountains into the sky merely with the pencil. They lose probability and effect by striving at too much; and with their ceaseless throes, oppress the imagination of the spectator, and bury the artist's fame under them. The only error of these pictures is that art here puts on her seven-league boots, and thinks it possible to steal a march upon nature. Mr. Martin might make Arthur's Seat sublime, if he chose to take the thing as it is; but he would be for squaring it according to the mould in his own imagination, and for clapping another Arthur's Seat on the top of it, to make the Calton Hill stare!

Again, with respect to the human figure. This has an internal structure, muscles, bones, blood-vessels, &c., by means of which the external surface is operated upon according to certain laws. Does the artist, with all his generalizations, understand these as well as nature does? Can he predict, with all his learning, that, if a certain muscle is drawn up in a particular manner, it will present a particular appearance in a different part of the arm or leg, or bring out other muscles, which were before hid, with certain modifications? But in nature all this is brought about by necessary

laws, and the effect is visible to those, and those only, who look for it in actual objects.

This is the great and master-excellence of the ELGIN MARBLES, that they do not seem to be the outer surface of a hard and immoveable block of marble, but to be actuated by an internal machinery, and composed of the same soft and flexible materials as the human body. The skin (or the outside) seems to be protruded or tightened by the natural action of a muscle beneath it. This result is miraculous in art: in nature it is easy and unavoidable. That is to say, art has to imitate or produce certain effects or appearances without the natural causes: but the human understanding can hardly be so true to those causes as the causes to themselves; and hence the necessity (in this sort of simulated creation) of recurring at every step to the actual objects and appearances of nature.

Having shown so far how indispensable it is for art to identify itself with nature, in order to preserve the truth of imitation, without which it is destitute of value or meaning, it may be said to follow, as a necessary consequence, that the only way in which art can rise to greater dignity or excellence is by finding out models of greater dignity and excellence in nature. Will any one, looking at the Theseus, for example, say that it could spring merely from the artist's brain, or that it could be done from a common, ill-made, or stunted body? The fact is that its

superiority consists in this, that it is a perfect combination of art and nature, or an identical, and as it were spontaneous, copy of an individual picked out of a finer race of men than generally tread this ball of earth. Could it be made of a Dutchman's trunk-hose? No. Could it be made out of one of Sir Joshua's Discourses on the middle form? No. How then? Out of an eye, a head, and a hand, with sense, spirit, and energy to follow the finest nature, as it appeared exemplified in sweeping masses, and in subtle details, without pedantry, conceit, cowardice, or affectation!

Some one was asking at Mr. Haydon's one day, as a few persons were looking at the cast from this figure, why the original might not have been done as a cast from nature? Such a supposition would account at least for what seems otherwise unaccountable-the incredible labour and finishing bestowed on the back and other parts of this figure, placed at a prodigious height against the walls of a temple, where they could never be seen after they were once put up there. If they were done by means of a cast in the first instance, the thing appears intelligible, otherwise not. Our host stoutly resisted this imputation, which tended to deprive art of one of its greatest triumphs, and to make it as mechanical as a shaded profile. So far, so good. But the reason he gave was bad, viz. that the limbs could not remain in those actions long enough to be

cast. Yet surely this would take a shorter time than if the model sat to the sculptor; and we all agreed that nothing but actual, continued, and intense observation of living nature could give the solidity, complexity and refinement of imitation which we saw in the half animated, almost moving, figure before us. Be this as it may, the principle here stated does not reduce art to the imitation of what is understood by common or low life. It rises to any point of beauty or sublimity you please, but it rises only as nature rises exalted with it too. To hear these critics talk, one would suppose there was nothing in the world really worth looking at. The Dutch pictures were the best that they could paint they had no other landscapes or faces before them. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Yet who is not alarmed at a Venus by Rembrandt? The Greek statues were (cum grano salis) Grecian youths and nymphs; and the women in the streets of Rome (it has been remarked †) look to this hour as if they had walked out of Raphael's pictures.

Nature is always truth: at its best, it is beauty and sublimity as well; though Sir Joshua tells us in one of the papers in the IDLER that Some one finely applied to the repose of this figure the words:

-Sedet, in æternumque sedebit,
Infelix Theseus.

† By Mr. Coleridge.