at once bold and tender, a tilth as yet rich and untried. Truly it was a palmy periodical during its brief reign, that same “London Magazine," whence the elegant genius and Addisonian style of John Scott had departed, early quenched, alas! and quenched in blood; where Hazlitt's penetrating pen was scratching as in scorn his rude immortalities; where De Quincey was transcribing, with tremulous hand, the most sublime and terrific dreams which opium and genius (things too kin to marry) had ever bred between them by unnatural union; where Reynolds was edging in among graver matters his clever Cockneyisms; where Lamb was lisping his wise and witty small talk; and where the idiomatic mind of Allan Cunningham was adding a flavour of Scottish romance, as of mountain honey, to the fine medley. As a critic, his character may be estimated from his pen and ink sketches in the "New Monthly," his life of Burns, his critique on Thomson, and his "Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects of Great Britain." His leading quality was constant healthiness of taste. He had no profound insight into principles, but neither was he ever misled into one-sided judgments; he was not endowed with profound discrimination, nor do you ever find in him volcanic bursts of enthusiasm, the violence of which is proportioned to the depth of dreary depression from which they spring, and which remind you of the snatches which a miserable man takes of all the pleasures within his reach, eager, short, hurrying. His criticisms are sweet-toned, sensible, generous; and as the building proceeds, the chisel ever and anon tunes itself to sudden impulse, and moves quick as to some unseen power, and you feel that the builder is a poet. He excels rather in critical talk than criticism. He seldom hazards a new opinion; never a paradox. He is content to catch the cream of common opinion into his own silver cup. His originality lies in the power of modifying the opinions of others, and in that fine forge of imagery which stands permanently in his own mind. His book on Painters is a gallery in itself. The English artists were precisely the theme for him. We question if he could have coped so worthily with the great Italians, in their knotty muscle, daring liberties, ethereal combinations, or in that palpable determination they evince to find their sole religion in their art-a determination so plain, that we could conceive them breaking up the true Cross for pencils, as we know they crucified slaves for subjects. Leaving them to the tingling brush of Fuseli, Cunningham shows us, in a fine mellow light, Gainsborough seated silent on his stile; Morland among his pigs; Barry propounding his canons of austere criticism, and cooking the while his steak; West arranging the tail of the Giant steed to be bestrode by Death, with as much coolness as he would his own cravat; Wilson with his hand trembling at his palette, half with enthusiasm, half with brandy; dear enthusiastic Blake painting Satan from the lifeasking, "Jane Boucher, do you love me, lass?" and there at once a beginning and an end of the courtship; or seeing the great vision pictured in the lines— 66 Tiger, tiger, burning bright Did he that made the lamb make thee? Opie lying all night awake with rapture, after his successful debut as a lecturer; or retorting the frown Peter Pindar sometimes cast at him from his enormous brows; Reynolds shifting his trumpet, or gazing with blandest look on his beauteous child-cherubs;" Flaxman cherishing his lofty ideals; Fuseli rising on tiptoe, the bursting little man, towards the creations of the giant Italians, or bristling up against the Academy in such sort as to teach them that an inspired prophet of Lilliput was worth a whole Brobdignag of blockheads. Thus are Allan's figures not set still and stiff at their palettes, but live, move, breathe, battle, love, burn, and die. We are thankful to Cunningham for this book, not only because it is a monument of his own powers, but because it does justice to the claims of British art;-an art which, considering the disadvantages of climate and sky, and national coldness of feeling, and taste, and bigoted religious prejudices, with which it has had to contend, when compared with the Italian school, is perhaps the greater wonder of the two. We admit that we have had no prodigies like Michael Angelo and Leonardo Da Vinci-those kings of the beautiful, who ruled with sway so absolute over all its regions, and shot their souls with equal ease and energy into a tower and a tune, a picture or a statue, a dome or a sonnét. These were monsters rather than men. We grant, too, that there has been but one Raffaelle-who was a man and no monster-and who of all men knew best the art of lifting man and woman quite out of earth "within the vail," and of showering on their face, and form, and bosom, and dress, beauty which is not of this cold clime-lustre unborrowed of that dim king of earthly day-meanings travelling out from eyes which seem set in eternity-motions of supernal grace and dignity-and who seemed made to supply the Christian's most craving desire after a pictured image of that face which was more marred than that of man-that form bent under the burden of a world's atonement, in a bend more glorious than the bend of the rainbow -those arms which were instinct and vibrating with everlasting love those long curling locks which seemed to twine lovingly round the thorns which pierced his pale majestic brow. No Raffaelle have we: the world has but one. Let Italy boast in him the Milton of painting, we have the Shakspere. Hogarth is ours -in his comic lights and tragic shadows-in his humour, force, variety, truth, absolute originality, quaint, but strong moral, and in that alchemy, all his own, by which, from the very worst materials, he deduces the richest laughter, or a sense of moral sublimity which is more precious than pure gold. And, not to speak of many others, we can challenge the world from the beginning to show a genius more unique, more insulated in his craggy solitude-like a volcanic cliff shot up as by unseen and unbounded catapult from the depth of the sea-less prefigured by any preceding mind-less likely to be eclipsed by any other more signally demonstrative in his single self of the truth, that the human mind is sometimes a native voice speaking immediately from the deep to the day-than the painter, the poet, the creator of the Deluge and Belshazzar's Feast. 66 We thank him, in fine, for this book, because, like ourselves, he loves the painter. We know nothing of the technicalities of the "serene and silent art:" we leave these to the "artist and his ape; let such describe the indescribable." But we dearly love our own ideal of the painter-as a graceful alias of the poet-as a genuine and bending worshipper of the forms by which the Great Artist has redeemed his creation from chaos, and, of the colours by which he has enchanted it into heaven-as himself, one of the finest figures in the landscapes of earth, sitting motionless under the rainbow; or dumb as the pencil of the lightning is dashing its fiery lines upon the black scroll of the thunder-cloud; or copying in severe sympathy from the cataract; or seated knitting" the mountain to the sky, on a crag above the eagle's eyrie; or leaning over the rural bridge, over which, perchance, in his reverie he bedrops his pencil into the still water; or mixing unnoticed in the triumphal show, which, after living its little hour on the troubled street-page, shall live on his canvass for evermore; or gazing like a spirit into the eye of genius or on the brow and blush of beauty; or in his still studio, sitting alone, chewing the cud of those sweet and bitter fancies he is afterwards to embody in form; or looking through hopeless, yet happy tears, at the works of elder masters; or spreading before him the large canvass which he must cause to glow into a princely painting, or perish in the attempt; or even drooping over an abortive design; or dashing his brush across it in the heat of his spirit; or maddening in love to the fair creation of his hands; or haunted by some terrible figure of his own drawing; or filling his asylum-cell with the chimeras of his soul; or dying with the last touch given to an immortal work, and with no wish for any epitaph but this, "I also was a painter." "Somewhat too much of this;" therefore, dear Allan Cunningham, farewell! Perhaps in some far future land We yet may meet-we yet may dwell- EBENEZER ELLIOTT. We have sometimes wondered that the forge has not sooner sent forth its poetical representative. It is undoubtedly one of the most imaginative of the objects of artificial life, especially when standing solitary, and on the edge of a dark wood. Hear how a man of genius describes it:" As I rode through the Schwarzald, I said to myself, That little fire, which glows across the dark-growing moor, where the sooty smith bends over the anvil, and thou hopest to replace thy lost horse-shoe, is it a detached, separated speck, cut off from the whole universe, or indissolubly united to the whole? Thou fool! that smithy fire was primarily kindled at the sun; is fed by air that circulates from before Noah's Deluge -from beyond the dog-star-therein, with iron force, and coal force, and the far stronger force of man, are battles and victories of force brought about. It is a little ganglion or nervous centre in the great system of immensity. Call it, if thou wilt, an unconscious altar, kindled on the bosom of the All, whose iron smoke and influence reach quite through the All-whose dingy priest, not by word, but by brain and sinew, preaches forth the mystery of Force." A smith, surrounded by an atmosphere of sparkles sending out that thick thunder which Schiller seems to have loved above all other music-presiding at the wild wedlock of iron and flame, and baptising the progeny men in the hissing trough-so independen -lord of his hammer and his right arm imagination to the days when the hamm the virgin echoes of the antediluvian stiff neck of the iron and the brassand Vulcan-or to the groves and or to Spain, and the Ebro, and sweeps before the mind's death, from the first rible Hyy stithy k your voke g the Etna cus hand of a son of Cain, down through the Grecian javelin; the Roman spear; the Persian scimitar; the Saracen blade, bright and sharp as the crescent-moon; the great two-handed sword of the middle ages; the bayonet, which bored a passage for the armies of Turenne; the pike; the battle-axe; the claymore of Caledonia: thus does imagination pile up a pedestal, on which the smith, his dusky visage, his uplifted hammer, and his patient anvil, look absolutely ideal; and the wonder is excited why till of late no "Message from the Forge" has been conveyed to the ears of men beyond its own incessant and victorious sound. And yet the forge had wrought and raved for ages, and amid all its fiery products reared no poet till it was said, "Let Ebenezer Elliott be." And though he stood forward somewhat ostentatiously as the self-chosen deputy to Parnassus of the entire manufacturing class, it is easy to find, in the large rough grasp of his intellect, in the daring of his imagination, in the untameable fire of his uneven, yet nervous line, in his impatient and contemptuous use of language, traces of the special trade over which he long presided; of the impression which a constant circle of fire made upon his imagination; and of the savage power which taught him at one time to wield the hammer and the pen with little difference in degree of animal exertion and mental fury. We can never divest our minds as we read him of the image of a grim son of the furnace, black as Erebus, riving, tearing, and smiting at his reluctant words; storming now and then at the disobedient ends of sentences; clutching his broad-nibbed quill, and closing the other and the other paragraph with the flourish of one who brings down upon the anvil a last sure and successful blow. Elliott was unquestionably one of the most masculine men of our era. His poorest copy of verses; his wildest sins against good taste and propriety; his most truculent invective; and even the witless personalities by which it pleases him so often to poison his poetry and his prose, will not conceal the brawny muscle, the strong intellect, and the stronger passions of a man. Burns, in his haughtiest moment, never grasped the sickle with a sturdier independ In in a tone of aut to pity a in your From the side of his furnace he spoke ern, decisive, and oracular, are his ism is so incessant and so fierce, manifest power and earnestness, lisgust or pity. But we defy you buse by shaking such a strong fist that your pity were quite thrown it through his tough hide. Re, and biting down the lip of your keep at a respectful distance from a lancing critically at the inspired iron |