He is treating of the prayer in the Litany against sudden death; and argues that the Christian ought to desire a dismissal like that of Moses, or Jacob, or Joshua, or David-a peaceful, leisurely termination of life, so as to comfort those whom he leaves behind, by filling their hearts with faith and hope; "and, to sum up all, to teach the world no less virtuously how to die, than they had done before how to live." Here is Tickell's golden rhyme in its native bed of prose. However, in poetry, as in nature, everything is double. If Tickell borrows, he also lends. His Ode on the Prospect of Peace, which obtained the warm praise of Addison, contains the outline of Goldsmith's lively portrait of the returning soldier:

TICKELL.

GOLDSMITH.

Near the full bowl he draws the The broken soldier, kindly bade fancied line, to stay,

And makes feign'd trenches in the Sat by his fire, and talk'd the night away.

Then sets the invested fort be- Wept o'er his wounds, or tales of

flowing wine;

fore her eyes,

sorrow done,

And mines that whirl'd batta- Shoulder'd his crutch, and show'd how fields were won.

lions to the skies.

AUGUST THE SIXTH.

IR GEORGE BEAUMONT said one day to Constable-"Do you not find it difficult to place your brown tree?" "Not in the least," was the answer, 66 for I never put such a thing in a picture!" On another occasion, the accomplished critic recommended the colour of an old violin for the prevailing tint of a landscape. Constable replied by laying one upon the lawn before the house. This morning I have amused myself with looking at our home scenery, with reference to the rival theories; and certainly, at the first glance, I saw nothing of the "Cremona " in tree, field, or lane. The white beech, stained over with faint, silvery green, is unlike the trunk of Hobbema or Both. But it might have stood to Constable for its portrait.

I think that the apparent contradiction may be explained. The colour of trees and grass depends chiefly on the light and distance in which they are viewed. Walk up to an elm, and mark the sunshine running along its sides, and afterwards retire to the end of the glade and look back; the bright tint will be sobered into a shadowy gloom, altogether different. The same change may be ob

served in the openings of a wood; and accordingly a poet, who has the true painter's eye, describes :

"The mossy pales that skirt the orchard green,
Here hid by shrubwood, there by glimpses seen;
And the brown pathway, that with careless flow
Sinks, and is lost among the trees below."

Wilkie says of one of Titian's famous landscapes, "The whites are yellow, the blue sky is green, and the green trees are the deepest brown. I have seen Ostade often on this scale; and if successful effect constitutes authority, how practically terrible is the tone of this great work; but how removed from the practice of modern times!"

Clever, scoffing Matthews (the "Invalid"), used to declare that G. Poussin's green landscapes had no charms for him, and that the delightful verdurous tint of nature could not be transferred by the pencil. The great masters took their colours from autumn, breathing a mellow shade of ideal hues over the whole. As Sir G. Beaumont observed of Rembrandt, they nourished the picture with warmth.

Titian produced compositions; Constable copies. Not a spot of moss escapes him. I remember a striking illustration of his faithfulness :-A cottage is closely surrounded by a corn-field, which, on the side sheltered from the heat of the sun, continues to be green, while the other parts are ripening into the golden colour. This truth of repre

sentation drew from an admirer the exclamation— "How fresh, how dewy, how exhilarating!" Of the elder painters, Albano alone preserved the green of his trees, though he touched them with a soft light of poetry unknown and unfelt by the English artist. The merit of Constable is in some degree that of Cowper. The middle tints of Claude, or the transparent distances of Rubens, were equally beyond his taste and capacity. He is pleasing, because he is true. Compare his trees with those of Watteau, of which the grotesqueness was a puzzle to Walpole, until he recognised them in the trimmed branches of the Tuileries.

An amusing page might be written on the favourite trees of landscape painters. G. Poussin was partial to the thin-leaved acacia; Ruysdael to the broad oak; Claude to the elm and stone pine; Rubens to the stumpy pollard; Salvator Rosa delighted in the chestnut, which flourished in the Calabrian mountains, where he studied it in all its forms; breaking and disposing it, as Gilpin says, in a thousand beautiful shapes, as the exigencies of his composition required. Perhaps its brittleness, which causes it to be often shattered by storms, recommended it still more to his picturesque eye.

Claude and Rubens may be regarded as the two types of landscape art. Standing between their pictures, we are led to compare the first to an Idyl of Theocritus; the second, to a splendid grouping of

Thomson. The former is all grace and sameness; the latter is all variety and brightness. In the Italian master, the fine sense of truthfulness is conspicuous. The season, the temperature, and the hour are defined. We feel warm in his summer noons, and draw our cloak round us in the cool air of autumn evenings. The history of Claude furnishes another example of the opposition and contradictions of Taste. Of his figures, Wilson said— "Do not fall into the common mistake of objecting to Claude's figures." And Gilpin lamented that the same pencil

"Oft crowded scenes which Nature's self might own,

With forms ill drawn, ill chosen, ill arrang'd,

Of man and beast, o'er-loading with false taste
His sylvan glories."

Hazlitt observed of Rubens, that he carries some one quality, or aspect of nature, to the extreme verge of probability. In other words, his works are always picturesque-i. e. composed with reference to the eye and its sensations. In a picture at St. Petersburg, the rose-tints of evening and the silver rays of the rising moon are strangely, but sweetly, intermingled. Rubens makes that appearance to be Nature, which is only one of her accidents. I have seen the setting sun redden the wood, and the rainbow spanning the lake; so that at one and the same instant of time the elm-tree