Thou thy Creator's goodness dost declare,
And what dear gifts on thee He did not spare,
A stain to human sense in sin that lowers.
What soul can be so sick which by thy songs
(Attir'd in sweetness) sweetly is not driven
Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites and wrongs,
And lift a reverend eye and thought to Heaven?
Sweet artless songster, thou my mind dost raise
To airs of spheres, yes, and to angels' lays.

MAY 8TH.

GOLDSMITH appears to have been very fond of Tibullus. "A diseased taste," he says (Essay xii.), "will prefer Ovid to Tibullus, and the rant of Lee to the tenderness of Otway." Goldsmith's criticism was obviously false, for Ovid includes Tibullus. However, some of his verses are very elegant; Mr. Cary, the translator of Dante, applauds the conclusion of the first elegy, as one of the finest passages he remembered-and few modern scholars had a wider acquaintance with poetic literature. Lanzi remarks, that he who feels what Tibullus is in poetry, knows what Andrea del Sarto is in painting. The parallel is apt; Sarto was distinguished by the finish of his style. In his "Holy Family Reposing," every hair has a distinct truth. The colouring of the painter corresponds with the language of the poet. In the fourth elegy of his third book, he describes himself tossing through a troubled night, until, as the sun rose above the hills, he fell asleep. Suddenly his chamber brightened with a beautiful apparition, which is most exquisitely described. Each word has its hue, like the separate hairs in Sarto's picture. Of all such excellence as that of Tibullus, the secret is labour. "I am glad your 'Fan' is mounted so soon; but I would have you varnish and glaze it at your leisure, and polish the sticks as much as you can." This was Pope's advice

ELOQUENCE OF FOX.

37

to Gay, which he was too indolent to follow. Genius, when it has the large sensitive eyes of taste, is slow and painful: Guido never satisfied himself with an eye, nor A. Caracci with an ear. When Domenichino was reproached for not finishing a picture, he said, "I am continually painting it within myself." How often Milton sat under a cedar with Eve, and Shakspere gazed into the passionate eyes of Juliet, before the last kindling glow of beauty was imparted!

MAY 9TH.

the

I SEE they are reprinting the speeches of Mr. Fox. It is known that Burke called him the most brilliant and accomplished debater whom the world ever saw. The praise was characteristic of the utterer and the subject. Burke, however, did not exclude the idea of eloquence from his definition. To Fox belonged the visible rhetoric. He swelled with the tide of invective, and rose upon flood of his indignation. A dear friend has given me a vivid portrait of his manner and appearance. Holding his hat grasped in both hands, and waved up and down with an ever-increasing velocity, while his face was turned to the gallery, he poured out torrents of anger, exultation, and scorn. But Fox the declaimer was paralysed by Fox the man. It was affirmed by a Greek writer, in a passage made famous by Ben Jonson, that a poet cannot be great without first being good; and Aristotle intimates that the personal purity of the orator was a question moved in his own day. Fox showed the truth of this critical axiom. His intellectual capacity was impaired by the moral. The statue is imposing, but the pedestal leans.

I will add that the late Mr. Green of Ipswich, an acute and well-informed observer, always mentioned with admiration Fox's

speeches on the Reform of Parliament in 1797, on the Russian armament, and his reply on the India Bill in 1783, which he pronounced to be absolutely stupendous. But the reader turns

It is

with most interest to the graceful side of his character; his delight in common rural pleasures, and the charms of literature. refreshing to accompany the stormy Cleon of Westminster into

VANDYCK'S PORTRAITS.

339

the shades of St. Anne's Hill, and see him, in the description of

his friend,

so soon of care beguiled,

Playful, sincere, and artless as a child,

enjoying the sunshine and flowers with an almost bucolic tenderness and freedom from restraint; either

watching a bird's nest in the spray,

Through the green leaves exploring day by day;

or, with a volume of Dryden in his hand, wandering from grove to and seat to seat

grove

To read there with a fervour all his own,
And in his grand and melancholy tone,

Some splendid passage not to him unknown.

I observe this morning the delicious effect of the young leaves mirrored in the still water. The colour is so delicate and fresh, that it might be called the bloom of green; and the charm is heightened by two swans sailing in their stately way, over the verdurous crystal, and looking like chaplets of white roses blown. along the grass.

MAY 10TH.

RODE over to Bramshill, the seat of Sir John Cope, and looked at Vandyck's portrait of himself. "That Flemish painter-that Antonio Vandyck—what a power he has!" The apostrophe which Scott puts into the mouth of Cromwell at Whitehall, before the picture of Charles I., rises to every lip in the presence of Vandyck. In truth of imitation, delicacy of drawing, and dignity of expression, he stands alone. No starveling forms of Albert Dürer—to adopt a phrase of Fuseli-no swampy excrescences of Rembrandt,

shuffle along in squalid deformity. Waller suggested the secret charm of his pencil in a most speaking line—

Strange that thy hand should not inspire

The beauty only, but the fire;

Not the form alone and grace,

But art and power of a face.

In a page on portrait-painters, I cannot omit two of different tastes, yet most wonderful genius-Holbein and Giorgione. No masters are more unlike; each is the antithesis of the other. Hazlitt thought that the works of Holbein are to the finest efforts of the pencil what state papers are to history; they present the character in part, but only the dry, the concrete, the fixed. Giorgione, on the contrary, gives the inner spirit and life of thought. His faces are ideal, and yet real. The same countenance, painted by Holbein and Giorgione, would resemble an English story told by Holinshed and illuminated by Spenser. Both are precious-the fact as authenticating the poetry, and the poetry as embellishing the fact. In a parallel, Rubens would naturally come in; but Raffaelle cannot be bracketed.

Sir

Something of imaginative reality is seen in Vandyck; in general beauty and completeness, he yields to Titian. "Vandyck's portraits," said Northcote, "are like pictures; Reynolds', like reflections in a looking-glass; Titian's, like the real people." Charles Eastlake has a remark on this characteristic of Titian, in a note to Goethe's theory of colours. He observes, with reference to the flesh-tint, that its effects, at different distances, can never be so well compared, as when the painter and his subject draw near and go by each other on an element so smooth, in scenery so tranquil, as Venice afforded to its greatest painter. Gliding along the waveless canals in the calm gondola, the rich complexions of Italian beauty, and the serious grandeur of manly