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chairs of the Senator and the Conservators. Two or three inexorable old Roman heads, in all the rigidity and hardihood of the Republic, but in plaster, frowned immediately opposite ;-for the Consular fasces, there were the wands of the servants of the Roman people, and for their Fasti, whole yards of servile inscription, amongst which that to Pius VII. was loftily pre-eminent for its length and devotion.* I turned away, and asked the keeper what more was there to see?-His answer was in itself an epitaph. "This is all:"

"Interrogeons le Tibre,
Lui seul a bien gouté
Sueur de peuple libre,
Crasse d'oisiveté-
Fi de la liberté,

A bas la liberté.

"De son arbre civique
Que nous est-il resté ?
Un baton despotique,
Sceptre sans majesté-
Fi de la liberté,

A bas la liberté."

The Abbate, who was still occupied in reading the inscriptions+ (though they were modern), overhearing my question, and imagining I intended prosecuting my researches much farther, immediately advanced, listened to the bell of the Capitol, which was then striking, smiled, and presented me significantly his watch. I understood the hint, and, feeling for a man who rises

The present festival is a faint shadow of the Petrarchan solemnities, as the Petrarchan were of the Capitoline games of Domitian. Domitian copied from Greece, not Rome, from the Pythian and Panathenaic ceremonies, and not from the Ludi Capitolini (instituted with quite another view) of Camillus. The moderns have substituted the laurel to the oak, as a senator to the senate. The last poetic coronation took place in the person of an Olimpia Corilla, (a nom de guerre) who has the glory of having suggested Corrinne, and to whom the whole Arcadia have not yet furnished a successor.

+These inscriptions form a voluminous history on marble of the present edifice and its glories. There is one to Paul III. decreeing a "statue" in the Capitol for his "having encreased and adorned the city by the erection of new houses," &c. The date is 1543, forty-seven years before the decree which declared infamous, and incapable of holding any public office, the proposer of such honours.-Leti Vita Sisto V. t. iii. The Curatores Viarum are the dedicators. Gregory XII. is complimented by the S. P. Q. R. with a sketch of his pontificate. A triumphal arch is promised by the same "Republic" to the "Roman" Innocent XIII. Benedict XIV. is thanked for having made judicious arrangements for the security and convenience of the treasury archives. Pius VI., for having refused "a brazen statue offered him by the Roman people," (had they repealed their law of 1590?) is lauded as a prince of singular modesty! But the inscription to Pius VII. placed there by the late Marchese Patrizi, is worthy of the pen, and practice of a courtier of the Porphyrogeniti of Constantinople. It begins :

"Pio VII. Pont. Max. Patri Patriæ
Forti. Magno." &c.

and goes on in a strain in which the real merits are lost in the adulation, for thirty-nine lines. It was erected in 1815, "ad augendam fastorum Capitolii majestatem ac celebritatem," embraces his whole reign, praises his friends, abuses his enemies, and stands nearly in the place formerly occupied by the portrait of Napoleon, now in the possession of Mr. Power. This was done when the people were crying out for bread and employment; but the labour was a labour of love, it was dedicated to his "benefactor" by the senator of the city," Pontificio solio adsistens" (a strange clinging to the shadow, when the substance was lost), and the people were not called on for either the flattery or the contribution. So far the people are to be congratulated; but for the senator-" Hic homo solidè sycophanta est."

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at five, dines at one, oats, no breakfast, and was still fasting, consented to break up my arrangements for the present, and reserve the remainder of the Capitoline for another morning. "Hunger will not obey the immortals themselves," says a moral poet, and Jupiter could not govern the world without his Epulones. Even antiquaries must dine," observed the Abbate; and happy the antiquaries, who like Re and Nibby, he seemed to add, can command, whenever a good appetite may prompt them, something more substantial than an ancient dinner. His head fell for a few moments ; he remained silent; I followed him slowly out, ruminating upon both sides of the medal: "the servant of the people" closed the door after us, took his mancia, and returned to his sleep and sunshine. The Abbate got into his caritelle with a sort of sigh, which was soon smothered by a doubt on the veracity of Livy; and we were already in the middle of a dissertation, which Guatani himself need not have despised, when we arrived at his lodgings in the Strada Giulia.

BOSWELL REDIVIVUS,-NO. III.
Third Conversation.

N-began by saying, "You don't much like Sir Joshua, I know; but I think that is one of your prejudices. If I was to compare him with Vandyke and Titian, I should say that Vandyke's portraits are like pictures (very perfect ones, no doubt), Sir Joshua's like the reflection in a looking-glass, and Titian's like the real people. There is an atmosphere of light and shade about Sir Joshua's, which neither of the others have in the same degree, together with a vagueness, which gives them a visionary and romantic character, and makes them seem like dreams or vivid recollections of persons we have seen. I never could mistake Vandyke's for any thing but pictures, and I go up to them to examine them as such: when I see a fine Sir Joshua, I can neither suppose it to be a mere picture, nor a man; and I almost involuntarily tur back to ascertain if it is not some one behind me reflected in the glass: when I see a Titian, I am riveted to it, and I can no more take my eye off from it, than if it were the very individual in the room.--That," he said, " is, I think, peculiar to Titian, that you feel on your good behaviour in the presence of his keen-looking heads, as if you were before company." I mentioned that I thought Sir Joshua more like Rembrandt than like either Titian or Vandyke: he enveloped objects in the same brilliant haze of a previous mental conception.""Yes," he said; "but though Sir Joshua borrowed a great deal, he drew largely from himself; or rather, it was a strong and peculiar feeling of nature working in him, and forcing its way out in spite of all impediments, and that made whatever he touched his own. In spite of his deficiency in drawing, and his want of academic rules and proper education, you see this breaking out like a devil in all his works. It is this that has stamped him. There is a charm in his portraits, a mingled softness and force, a grasping at the end with nothing harsh or unpleasant in the means, that you will find no where else. He may go out of fashion for a time, but you must come back to him again, while a thousand imitators and academic triflers are forgotten. This proves him to have been a real genius. The same thing, however, made him a very bad master. He knew nothing of rules which are alone to be taught; and he could not communicate his instinctive feel

ing of beauty or character to others. med nothing from him, while I was with him; and none of his scholars (if I may except myself) ever made any figure at all. He only gave us his pictures to copy. Sir Joshua undoubtedly got his first ideas of the art from Gandy, though he lost them under Hudson; but he easily recovered them afterwards. That is a picture of Gandy's there (pointing to a portrait of a little girl.) If you look into it, you will find the same broken surface, and varying outline, that was so marked a characteristic of Sir Joshua. There was nothing he hated so much as a distinct outline, as you see it in Mengs and the French school. Indeed he ran into the opposite extreme; but it is one of the great beauties of art to show it waving and retiring, now losing and then recovering itself again, as it always does in nature, without any of that stiff, edgy appearance, which only pedants affect or admire. Gandy was never out of Devonshire but his portraits are common there. His father was patronized by the Duke of Ormond, and one reason why the son never came out of his native county was, that when the Duke of Ormond was implicated in the rebellion to restore the Pretender in 1715, he affected to be thought too deep in his Grace's confidence, and a person of too much consequence, to venture up to London, so that he chose to remain in a voluntary exile."-I asked N if he remembered the name of Stringer at the Academy, when he first came up to town. He said he did, and that he drew very well, and once put the figure for him in a better position to catch the foreshortening. He inquired if I knew any thing about him, and I said I had once vainly tried to copy a head of a youth by him admirably drawn and coloured, and in which he had attempted to give the effect of double vision by a second outline accompanying the contour of the face and features. Though the design might not be in good taste, it was executed in a way that made it next to impossible to imitate. I called on him afterwards at his house at Knutsford, where I saw some spirited comic sketches in an unfinished state, and a capital Cignani. All his love and skill in art had, I found, been sacrificed to his delight in Cheshire ale, and the company of country-squires. Tom Kershaw, of Manchester, used to say that he would rather have been Dan Stringer than Sir Joshua Reynolds at twenty years of age. Kershaw, like other North-country critics, thought more of the executive power than of the aesthetical faculty; forgetting that it signifies comparatively little how well you execute a thing, if it is not worth executing.

I am sometimes thought cold and cynical myself; but I hope it is not from any such overweening opinion of myself. I remember once going with Wilkie to Angerstein's, and because I stood looking and said nothing, he seemed dissatisfied, and said, "I suppose you are too much occupied with admiring, to give me your opinion?" And I answered hastily, "No, indeed! I was saying to myself, And is this all that the art can do?" But this was not, I am sure, an expression of triumph, but of mortification, at the defects which I could not help observing even in the most accomplished works. I knew they were the best, but I could have wished them to be a hundred times finer than they were! N- then talked of his own journey to Rome, of the beauty of the climate, of the manners of the people, of the imposing effect of the Roman Catholic religion, of its favourableness to the fine

arts, of the churches full of pictures, of the manner in which he passed his time, studying and looking into all the rooms in the Vatican he had no fault to find with Italy, and no wish to leave it. "Gracious and sweet was all he saw in her!" As he talked, he looked as if he saw the different objects pass before him, and his eye glittered with familiar recollections. He said, Raphael did not scorn to look out of himself or to be beholden to others. He took whole figures from Masaccio to enrich his designs, because all he wanted was to advance the art and ennoble human nature. After he saw Michael Angelo, he improved in freedom and breadth, and if he had lived to see Titian, he would have done all he could to avail himself of his colouring. All his works are an effusion of the sweetness and dignity of his own character. He did not know how to make a picture; but for the conduct of the fable and the developement of passion and feeling (noble but full of tenderness) there is nobody like him. This is why Hogarth can never come into the lists. He does not lift us above ourselves: our curiosity may be gratified by seeing what men are, but our pride is soothed by seeing them made better. Why else is Milton preferred to Hudibras, but because the one aggrandises our notions of human nature, and the other degrades it? Who will make any comparison between a Madona of Raphael, and a drunken prostitute by Hogarth? Do we not feel more respect for an inspired Apostle than for a blackguard in the streets? Raphael points out the highest perfection of which the human form and faculties are capable, and Hogarth their lowest degradation or most wretched perversion. Look at his attempts to paint the good or beautiful, and you see how faint the impressions of these were in his mind. Yet these are what every one must wish to cherish in his own bosom, and must be most beholden for to those who lend him the powerful assistance of their unrivalled conceptions of true grandeur and beauty. Sir Joshua strove to do this in his portraits, and this it was that raised him in public estimation; for we all wish to get rid of defects and peculiarities as much as we can. He then said of Michael Angelo, he did not wonder at the fame he had acquired. You are to consider the state of the art before his time, and that he burst through the mean and little manner even of such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Pietro Perugino, and through the trammels that confined them, and gave all at once a gigantic breadth and expansion that had never been seen before, so that the world were struck with it as with a display of almost supernatural power, and have never ceased to admire since. We are not to compare it with the examples of art that have followed since, and that would never have existed but for him, but with those that preceded it. He found fault with the figure of the flying monk in the St. Peter Martyr, as fluttery and theatrical, but agreed with me in admiring this picture, and in my fondness for Titian in general. He mentioned his going with Prince Hoare and Day to take leave of some fine portraits of Titian's that hung in a dark corner of a Gallery at Naples, and as Day looked at them for the last time with tears in his eyes, he said, "Ah! he was a fine old mouser!"-I said I had repeated this expression (which I had heard him allude to before) somewhere in writing, and was surprised that people did not know what to make of it. Nsaid, Why that is exactly what I should have thought. There is the difference between writing and speaking. In writing, you address the

average quantity of sense or information in the world; in speaking, you pick your audience, or at least know what they are prepared for, or previously explain what you think necessary. You understand the expression because you have seen a great number of Titian's pictures, and know that cat-like, watchful, penetrating look he gives to all his faces, which nothing else expresses, perhaps, so well as the phrase Day made use of: but the world in general know nothing of this; all they know or believe is, that Titian is a great painter like Raphael, or any other famous person. Suppose any one was to tell you, Raphael was a fine old mouser: would you not laugh at this as absurd? and yet the other is equally nonsense or incomprehensible to them. No, there is a limit, a conversational licence which you cannot carry into writing. This is one difficulty I have in writing: I do not know the point of familiarity at which I am to stop; and yet I believe I have ideas, and you say I know how to express myself in talking."

I inquired if he remembered much of Johnson, Burke, and that set? He said, "Yes, a good deal, as he had often seen them. Burke came into Sir Joshua's painting-room one day, when N--, who was then a young man, was sitting for one of the children in Count Ugolino. (It is the one in profile with the hand to the face.) He was introduced as a pupil of Sir Joshua's, and, on his looking up, Mr. Burke said, 'Then I see that Mr. Nis not only an artist, but has a head that would do for Titian to paint.'-Goldsmith and Burke had often violent disputes about politics; the one being a staunch Tory, and the other at that time a Whig and outrageous anti-courtier. One day he came into the room, when Goldsmith was there, full of ire and abuse against the late king, and went on in such a torrent of the most unqualified invective that Goldsmith threatened to leave the room. The other, however, persisted, and Goldsmith went out, unable to bear it any longer. So much for Mr. Burke's pretended consistency and uniform loyalty! When N- first came to Sir Joshua, he wished very much to see Goldsmith; and one day Sir Joshua, on introducing him, asked why he had been so anxious to see him? 'Because,' said N-, he is a notable man. This expression notable, in its ordinary sense, was so contrary to Goldsmith's character, that they both burst out a-laughing very heartily. Goldsmith was two thousand pounds in debt at the time of his death, which was hastened by his chagrin and distressed circumstances; and when "She Stoops to Conquer" was performed, he was so choked all dinner-time that he could not swallow a mouthful. A party went from Sir Joshua's to support it. The present title was not fixed upon till that morning. Nwent with Ralph, Sir Joshua's man, into the gallery, to see how it went off; and after the second act, there was no doubt of its success.' N-- says, people had a great idea of the literary parties at Sir Joshua's. He once asked Lord Boringdon to dine with Sir Joshua and the rest; but though a man of rank and also of good information, he seemed as much alarmed at the idea as if you had tried to force him into one of the cages at Exeter-'Change, N remarked that he thought people of talents had their full share of admiration. He had seen young

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*That is, a remarkable man, OctVoLXVII. NOŊ LXX.

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