English, with southern light streaming round them, as in these verses: "Now when the rosy-fingered morning faire, Had spread her purple robe through dewy aire, The warm blush of the morning, and the far-off purple rim of the hills, have the lucid depth and splendour of Titian. And if the colour of Spenser be Venetian, his combinations are often Flemish. A picture of Rubens is a commentary on a stanza. He has been justly regarded as the painter's poet. They who esteem him least, admire his rare eye for effect and artistic arrangement. Hence Walpole told his arid correspondent, Mr. Cole, that he was building a bower, and feared that he must go and read Spenser, wading through all his allegories to get at a picture. He would easily have found it. For Spenser is not the representative of a single school, but the abstract and epitome of each. The brilliant flush of his general manner belongs to Rubens; his feminine expression reflects the serenity of Guido; the melody of his language breathes the bloom of Correggio; his wilder contortions of imagination recall the fierce audacity of Spranger; and his dark sketches of ugliness and crime foretell Salvator Rosa: not as we see him in the tossing pines, the driving hurricanes, and the swarthy brigands of his landscape: but as he startles us in his historical portraits, especially in the "Regulus" at Cobham. I might add that Spenser's passion for sumptuous processions, splendid companies, and variegated festivals, proclaims his relationship to Paul Veronese, who is unsurpassed for his exquisite disposal of lights, Eastern dresses, and gorgeous array of priests and warriors. Spenser's portraits are, in the truest sense, Venetian. Titian, taking up the rude back grounds of Philippo Lippi, raised landscape-painting into a separate branch of art; but the historical pencil succeeded equally in trees and nature. In the Faëry Queen, the harmony between faces and scenery is striking. I venture to suggest another peculiarity in the poet's characters. The senatorial dignity of Titian's heads is felt by every spectator; Spenser awaken's the same feeling of awe and interest, by the beautiful haze of his allegory. The softening shade into which he withdraws his heroes and heroines, both deepens the lustre of their features, and lends a solemnity to their expression. With all his beauties, he is not, and will not be, a favourite of the many. His cantos are never read for their story. The criticism of Pope's old lady is still true. They are picture-galleries, of which the eye of taste never grows weary. It sinks down into the verdant depth of a stanza, as of the greenest landscape of Albano. But allegory has defects in herent and unconquerable. Gay worlds of fiction, hanging upon nothing, and launched into the wide expanse of imagination, must be shone over and warmed by common feelings and life. When that light and heat are wanting, the eye may be dazzled, but the heart is untouched. The reader strays through an enchanted garden, and sighs for the familiar voices of affection, and the charms of home endearment. Like the Trojan exile in the Latin paradise, he opens his arms in vain to a shadowy Anchises; and the child cannot embrace his father in the Elysium of fancy. These are the difficulties of parabolic description. If Spenser could not bend the bow, what hand may try? The English taste turns aside from allegory in its fairest form. Opie complained that no landscape was admired, except a view of some particular place; and Payne Knight declared that he had seen more delight manifested at a piece of waxwork, or a mackerel painted on a deal board, than he had ever observed to be excited by the Apollo, or Transfiguration. names. JULY THE TWENTY-SECOND. OHNSON says something about the impossibility of a conversationist being honest. No account can answer his cheques. To keep up appearances, he draws gold under other Talkers in books are not exempt from the difficulties or penalties of their brethren round the table. Henceforth, Mr. Sydney Smith must relinquish the most striking feature in his famous portrait of a poor ecclesiastic: "A picture is drawn of a clergyman with 1307. per annum, who combines all moral, physical, and intellectual advantages: a learned man, dedicating himself intensely to the care of his parish; of charming manners and dignified deportment; six feet two inches high, beautifully proportioned, with a magnificent countenance, expressive of all the cardinal virtues and the Ten Commandments."-(Works, T. iii. 200.) The proprietor of the phrase is Miss Seward, in a letter to G. Hardinge (T. ii. 250), about a gentleman who was not so good as he looked: "So reserved as were his manners! and his countenance! a very tablet upon which the Ten Commandments seemed written." JULY THE TWENTY-THIRD. NEVER saw so many glow-worms together as on this balmy evening; and their sparkle is unusually vivid, being occasioned, I suppose, by the delicious weather; for the glowworm grows brighter or dimmer, as the air is warmer or colder. All the bank seems to be on fire with these diamonds of the night, as Darwin calls them. If Titania had overturned a casket of jewels in a quarrel with Oberon, the grass could not have looked gayer. Thomson describes the appearance with his usual liveliness: "Among the crooked lanes, on ev'ry hedge The glow-worm lights his gem, and through the dark Perhaps he is slightly astray in his zoology: for although the male has two spots of faint lustre, the female is the real star of the wood-path. A double portion of light is her compensation for the loss of wings. Her lamp is to bring to her the friend whom she is unable to visit. She may be seen in a summer evening climbing up a blade of grass, to make herself more conspicuous. Dear Mr. White, of Selborne, compared her to the classic lady who |