OF FACTS AND OCCURRENCES RELATING TO LITERATURE, THE SCIENCES, AND THE ARTS. NOTICE. The conductors beg to announce that a TALE, entitled, A ROMANCE IN SIX CHAPTERS, By Mr. GEORGE Augustus Sala, author of A Journey Due North, the "Hogarth Papers," in the Cornhill Magazine, etc., etc., will be commenced in the November number of the REGISTER, Another serial tale, to be entitled, ALL THE TALENTS, fashioned somewhat upon the model of Punch. It is to be called the Porcupine, and will number amongst its contributors Mr. JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD, Mr. H. J. BYRON, Mr. WILLIAM BROUGH, Mr. FRANK TALFOURD, Mr. EDMUND YATES, Mr. LEICESTER BUCKINGHAM, and others of the gentlemen who, on the evening of the day on which this is written (September 24), will give a second amateur performance in Liverpool for the benefit of the widow and family, of poor ROBERT BROUGH, the founder of Liverpool's first satirical journal, the Liverpool Lion. The price of the Porcupine will be one penny, and as its proprietors possess capital and will be commenced in the same number, and both tales will then energy, and its staff includes some of the best wits of the day, be continued from month to month until completed. NOTES AND MEMORANDA. THE daily newspaper which the "National Newspaper League Company, Limited" was founded for the purpose of establishing, under the name of the Dial, is to be started, it is now decided, in connexion with the Morning Star. The shareholders in the Dial company have deputed four of their directors to join four of the present proprietors of the Morning Star, and these eight gentlemen are to form a new limited company, to which the Dial and Morning Star,-for we presume that this is the name which the Morning Star will go by after the junction of its proprietary with the Dial company,-will belong, the four directors of the Dial company holding their shares in the new company as trustees on behalf of their nine thousand fellow shareholders in the Dial company. The nominal capital of the new company will be £35,000. The proprietors of the Morning Star consider their copyright, connexion, building, and plant to be worth £17,500, and will contribute these as their half of the capital of the new company, the Dial company contributing its half in hard cash. So we are to have, at last, if not exactly what the promoters of the Dial scheme have been promising us for the last three years or so, what scheme ever was carried out precisely after the manner in which its promoters originally intended it should be ?-at least something in the shape of a daily Dial. We are about to have a new weekly newspaper, too,-one which is to be printed half in English and half in French, and to be called the Treaty. As indicated by its title, it will advocate opinions in harmony with the international trading negotiations now being completed at Paris by Mr. Cobden. A recent addition to the number of trade journals may also claim mention here. The new-comer is called the Weekly Traveller, and is devoted, according to its prospectus, "to the best interests of grocers, cheesemongers, and oilmen.' These organs of particular trades or professions are rapidly increasing in number, both in England and in America. Liverpool is determined to have a local weekly magazine, OCTOBER, 1860.] it will start with every prospect of success. It will be strange, indeed, if a city the exact size of New York cannot support a light cheap magazine of this kind. A similar journal was announced in Manchester about a year since, but the project never assumed any practical shape. In politics, the Porcupine will represent the school of the " Liverpool Financial Reformers." Its first number will appear early in October. We congratulate the bookselling, and we may add the book-buying, world upon the announcement that the "London Catalogue" and the "British Catalogue" are now one property, and that the proprietors are actively engaged in preparing a new and complete Catalogue, combining the advantages of both the old ones, with many new improvements, and in all respects thoroughly adapted to present wants. It is evident that such a Catalogue was only to be secured by united ability and exertion; but two or three men in an age possess the qualifications necessary for the production of such a Catalogue, and they ought not to waste any of their time or resources by competition. The old "London Catalogue" had many valuable points; the chief advantage which its younger rival, the "British Catalogue," had over it consisted in the latter specifying the month and year in which each book was published. We are glad to learn that this feature will be retained in the new catalogue,-the proprietors of which have done well, and deserve the support of the trade and the public. Vive l'alliance! -"Messrs. CHAPMAN and HALL have concluded an arrange. ment with Mr. CHARLES DICKENS for a new serial, which will be commenced very shortly." So we read in Dr. CHARLES MACKAY'S London Review. We read also, however, in the Publishers' Circular of the same date,-"The report to which we alluded in our last number, as a report that Mr. DICKENS is engaged in writing a new work of fiction, is, we believe, incorrect. The statement originated in a provincial journal, and was copied into many of the London papers. London correspondents who furnish letters full of news for provincial enlightenment, appear to be of the opinion of that Duchess of Rutland alluded to by Horace Walpole, "For ever loved, revered,-my heart's first friend,Tender as love itself, and true as truth, I would that men might see thee with my eyes, Know thee as I have known-then should fame's wreath Yet I, who know thee best, and have enshrined So speak, how dear thy worth!-That which has been Alone be praise! All good my life can show God knows, I give thee but thine own again!" A new book by Mr. RALPH WALDO EMERSON is announced by Messrs. SMITH, ELDER, and Co. It is entitled, "On the Right Conduct of Life." It will be published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. The Critic of September 22nd has the following:-"Apropos of the Cornhill, the curiosity of literary quidnuncs has been not a little piqued by a sentence in the weekly gossip of the Illustrated London News of Saturday last. New blood,' said the gossiper of our illustrated contemporary, will shortly be infused into the Cornhill, and those who are apt to grow weary of dull verbosity will be glad to learn that the seemingly interminable Hogarth Papers will be concluded in the forthcoming October number of this admirable magazine.' As the gossiper on literature and art of the Illustrated London News is known to be the writer of the Hogarth Papers in the Cornhill, this self-condemnation seemed to indicate a ne plus ultra of modesty, rather foreign to the literary character. Ill-natured rumour will have it that the phrase 'dull verbosity' ought to have been included in inverted commas, and was originally used by Mr. Thackeray himself, in spite of his well-turned compliment to the biographer of Hogarth in the last of the Roundabout Papers.' Report even goes the length of hinting that we may expect before long a rival to the Cornhill, to be called the Temple-bar Magazine, and edited by no other person than the gossiper of the Illustrated London News and biographer of Hogarth in this 'admirable magazine.'" We imagine that this "rumour" and "report" are about as well founded as the "report" respecting Mr. DICKENS already referred to. Since the article on "Weather Theories," which appears in the latter part of this number, was put in type, the following correspondence between Mr. W. PATERSON and Sir JOHN HERSCHELL has been published: "Glossop, August 29, 1860. "Sir, I have just heard a report here, to the effect that you had predicted that we should have a series of heavy floods during the present month of August, and that people were remarking how anlly your predictions had been verified. Perfectly assured that you would not have made any such prediction as to a future state of the weather, I had no hesitation in giving the report an unqualified contradiction. As my simple contradiction, however, may not have much weight, I would feel obliged if you would be kind enough to state whether any circumstance, wrongly understood, may have originated the rumour. Such reports are frequently heard among ignorant people, during a season like this, without exciting surprise; but when circulated by gentlemen of position, they tend to throw discredit upon science, and are very prejudicial to the reputation of those who are slandered by them. "I am, sir, your obedient servant, "W. PATERSON. "Sir J. F. W. Herschell, Bart., F.R.S." " 'Collingwood, Hawkhurst, Kent, August 31, 1860. "Sir,-I thank you for contradicting any statements to the effect that I have 'predicted the weather,' or that I have said we should have heavy floods, etc., during the present month. At the same time I do plead guilty to having formed an opinion, from some remarkable phenomena exhibited by the sun last year, and others which it has since continued, and still continnes, in a somewhat diminished degree, to exhibit, that this summer would prove, as it has done, a rainy one; and I have, perhaps, expressed that opinion in private conversation among friends, though assuredly never in such a way as I could suppose would come to be publicly cited. I have received many letters about my 'predictions,' informing me that I stand charged with predicting the most dreadful storm ever known, and asking me when and where it would take place. One gentleman,-having heard that I had stated that several feet thick of ice are interposed between the earth and the sun, thereby causing this cold summer,-very consecutively and very rationally calls on me to publish a letter in the Times, informing the world" how it got there." You, sir, seem to have clearer and better notions about such things; and, I dare say, can easily understand how it is possible for an observant person, connecting many scattered indications and some very remarkable and unusual phenomena with speculations on their possible or probable eensequences, to have been led to form a general opinion as to the character of a season in advance, without aspiring to the rather unenviable reputation of a weather prophet. Scientifically speak. ing, and connecting those phenomena (which are publici juris) with the laws of solar periodicity, established by Schwabe and Wolf, I am disposed to regard the meteorology of the last twelve months as more pregnant with instruction than that of any equal lapse of time on record; and I may take some opportunity to But I certainly shall consider myself obliged by your repudiating state my views on that matter in a more definite and public form. for me the announcement of any given sort of weather for any given time and place, as a thing which I think is at present quite beyond the power of any meteorologist, except in a very few cases, such as that of an imminent cyclone in the hurricane regions, from barometric indications, and one or two other strong indications of immediately pending changes, which general experience has suggested to the weather wise.' "I am, Sir, your obedient servant, "W. Paterson, Esq." "J. F. W. HERSCHELL II. "King, we cried to thec!-Strong in replying, The word and sword sprang rapid and sure, O! first soldier of Italy, crying Now grateful, exultant, we look in thy face. That freedom's first soldier, the freed should call III. "This is our beautiful Italy's birthday: Generous souls, whether many or fewer, Bring her the gift, and wish her the good; And Heaven presents on this sunny earth-day The noble King to the land renewed. Is it not so, Cavour? Roar, cannon-mouths!-proclaim, install The King of us all! IV. "Grave he rides through the Florence gateway, While rings the cry without interval, V. "Cry, free peoples!-honour the nation By crowning the true man,-and none is true! Burn over from terrace, roof, window, and wall, VI. "Grave! A good man's ever the graver That he thinks of his vow on that royal pall, VII. "Flowers, flowers, from the flowery city! Such innocent thanks for a deed so pure, The nation invites him to enter his Pitti He'll stand where the reptiles were used to crawl, VIII. "Grave, as the manner of noble men is, The deed unfinished will weigh on the doer; That the King shall reign where oppressors fall, Just at the moment of going to press, we receive intelligence of the melancholy death of Mr. HERBERT INGRAM, proprietor of the Illustrated London News, and M.P. for Boston. The following, called forth by this event, appears in a contemporary. We may be able, in a subsequent number, to give some original details relating to the remarkable career of Mr. INGRAM,-whose successes in connexion with the newspaper press have been the greatest that this generation has seen : "By the arrival of the American mail at a late hour last night, the sad intelligence of the death of Mr. INGRAM,in consequence of a collision between a schooner and the Lady Elgin steamer, on Lake Superior (a calamity which occurred on the 8th instant),-is fully corroborated. Three hundred lives, it is stated, were lost owing to this catastrophe, among whom were several English travellers. Mr. Ingram was on a visit to Canada for the purpose of spending the holidays during the recess, and the painful intelligence of his 2 sudden death has caused a deep feeling of regret, not only among the large circle of his immediate friends, by whom he was so well known and respected, but among the general public. Mr. Herbert Ingram was born in 1811, at Boston, Lincolnshire, a town in which his earliest years were passed, which he subsequently represented in parliament, and with which his after life was intimately associated. After serving an apprenticeship as a printer in Boston, he removed to Nottingham, where he carried on business as printer, bookseller, and news-agent, in the conduct of which the same qualities of steadiness, industry, and perseverance, which conduced to his subsequent successes, were largely manifested. It was while in business, moreover, at Nottingham that he conceived the idea and matured the project of the illustrated journal which was destined, many years afterwards, to confer on him celebrity and fortune. The native shrewdness which was so conspicuous a feature in Mr. Ingram's character led him to anticipate the most fortunate results from the adoption of the principle of illustration. In accordance with his strong convictions on this point, Mr. Ingram started the Illustrated London News in May, 1842, the progress of which, to an amount of popularity altogether unprecedented, has long been established. In 1852 the retirement of Sir Gilbert Heathcote from the representation of Boston gave Mr. Ingram the opportunity of testing the respect and good opinion of his own townspeople; and though other candidates were also in the field, his appeal to their favour was successful, and he was returned by a very large majority. As a representative of Boston, Mr. Ingram ever evinced a praiseworthy interest in its local institutions, and in everything connected with its moral, intellectual, and sanitary improvement. At the general election which occurred on the dissolution in 1857, he was returned without opposition. In addition to his senatorial honours, he was a magistrate for the county of Herts, chairman of the Boston and Sleaford Railway, and deputy lieutenant for the county of Lincoln. So far, however, as the community at large is concerned, the memory of Mr. Ingram will be mainly associated with the journal he projected, and which has afforded throughout its prosperous career such unmis takable evidence of his sagacity and good management." EMINENT LIVING ARTISTS.-SIR EDWIN LANDSEER. BY WALTER THORNBURY, AUTHOR OF "LIFE IN SPAIN." "SIR EDWIN," as we, the public, fondly and familiarly call the Shakspeare of animal painters, was born in 1803, and is therefore now little short of sixty, which is some years beyond the intellectual climacteric, and should be remembered as a guiding date, when we have to criticize his great but unequal later works. He is an artist by hereditary right and family instinct, being the eldest son of the well-known engraver, John Landseer. He began very early, I believe, sketching the Scotch terriers he played with, and studied them in childhood, when he was rather an equal and fellow-romper than a great maestro, and a student of animal philosophy. An exhibition of his early etchings, some years since, in London, showed that before fourteen, as soon as he could think steadily,-already he had learned to observe pigs, dogs, etc., keenly, to love them before he drew them, and to draw them as though he loved them. All the artist's instinct showed early in the gifted painter. His eye was quick at seeing, and true in aiming. He had both the sympathy and precision of a perfect artistic marksman. He had an irresistible desire to select, arrange, and compose; and he had not only the craving, but the power. He not only copied, but he began early to compose and invent, which is a higher tendency. He not only drew his Scotch Terrier wiry and curly, and arch and shrewd,-his Favourite Spaniel rich and pampered, his Horse and Cart,-and his Wanton Puppy,but he put together his studies and observations into stories and animal romances,-as in his Fighting Dogs getting Wind (1819), Ratcatchers (1821), Impertinent Puppies dismissed by a Monkey (1822), Prowling Lion (1821), Lion enjoying his Repast, and the Lion enjoying his Meal,-all showing that a painter had arisen with a Scotch, leaden, cold eye for colour, but with a mind much more versatile and much more imaginative than vigorous Snyders or coarse Hondekoeter. Already he displayed that Esopian humour, breadth of knowledge, and rejoicing power, that indicates him the emperor of a great branch of art. It was not merely a painter that had arisen,-it was an animal painter,-one who did not wish to drag down animals to their ordinary serfish posture, at the foot of men,-but who desired, with all the earnestness of one with a mission, to elevate the animal in "the social scale," as the cant is, or rather to show the point of contact between the animal and human minds;-to show the monkey, witty; the dog, sarcastic, churlish, tyrannical, gentle, generous, that has been the ideal of Landseer's artlife. This ideal was a want of forty years ago, and answers -to the desire of Tennyson and our later poets to invest the landscape with a human interest, to make trees groan and weep, and to represent the wind as rejoicing over the ruin it causes, a tendency which some think rather pantheistic and dangerous if carried too far, and the condemnation of which by Mr. Ruskin shows that a reaction has arisen against it. Among the earlier tendencies of Sir Edwin was that of portraiture; but even here his imagination, vigour, and originality, would never let him fancy copying features; so he launched out into varieties of costume, and those accidental movements that might convey some sense of the latter's peculiarities, age, or rank. Of this class, though, I know not of what year, I specially remember, with delight and admiration, a graceful half-length of a lady in a Spanish mantilla, falling in a black cascade upon her shoulders. She looks out of a window, and exhibits with Vandyke-skill and unconsciousness a pair of very exquisite taper hands. The other is the Naughty Boy. This picture is said to be the portrait of a sulky boy, who pouted and cried when Landseer tried to persuade him to sit. There he stands, in beautiful peevishness,-a fretful English Cupid,—with his broken slate, and toys strewn around his feet. I know nothing of Sir Edwin's youthful studies, but in 1815 I find him a pupil of poor Haydon's,-just as that enthusiast had begun his picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, now, I believe, in America. Mr. Landseer, the engraver, one day, in 1815, brought his two sons, Edwin and Charles, the genius and the mere man of talent, to R. B. Haydon, historical painter, who was, as usual, up to his ears in debt and controversies. Mr. Landseer drew near to Haydon, and, as the inimitable Diary, edited so well by Mr. Tom Taylor, mentions, said to the little fierce Napoleonic man,— "When do you let your beard grow, Haydon, and take pupils ?" To which Haydon replied, "If my instructions are useful or valuable, now." "Will you let my boys come?" At once Haydon agreed. The clever boys were to come every Monday to that dim, beleaguered lodging to get a plan of work for the week. Edwin took Haydon's dissections of the lion at once, and Haydon advised him, with his great passion for anatomy, to dissect animals, as the only way of "acquiring their construction." It was this visit that led Haydon, seeing the Landseers make such rapid propress, to form a school, and endeavour to establish a better and more regular system of instruction than even that of the Academy. To this school came William Harvey, the illustrator, Eastlake (now Sir Charles), and for none of these pupils did Haydon take a shilling of payment. Years after, when poor Haydon was lower and lower, his old pupil, Sir Charles, bought the Judgment of Solomon, Haydon's best picture, that had been gathering dust in bankrupt warehouses, and retained it as a valuable relic,-as an unequal man's chef d'œuvre. It was not at this early time that Landseer got into his later fault of too much humanizing the animal, of making his monkeys more old Voltaires than they really are, for the sake of the humour,-his costermonger dogs more costermongery,-his spaniels more dandy or lady-like. We pardon the exaggeration of sop, because he is writing their imagination; but Landseer's Dogs reading the Paper require some indulgence before we can remember that they are mere actors, performing at a great canine theatre. The monkey pictures of Landseer form a class by themselves. They exhibit that homunculus, that parody of man, that devil's miniature model of Adam, as the negro legends have it, in every condition of life,-playful, angry, envious, wilful, and mischievous. He does not draw them as lusus nature, but as old friends or playmates, whose wills, gambols, tricks, peevishnesses, and pilferings, he knew by heart. This was not an ambitious walk of art: Mr. Landseer made it a grand one, by ruling in it supreme, by conquering it thoroughly, and by introducing perpetual variety as the great popular element. But in spite of victories over the deer, the monkey, and the horse, it is as a dog painter, perhaps, that Landseer has become, and will become, best known. It is true that no one is more wonderful in imitating texture than Sir Edwin. Veronese is marvellous with the twilled linen of his bishops and priests, Titian in his flesh, Teniers in his brass stew-pans, Vandyke in his silks and velvets; but no one can represent the hair of animals better than Landseer. He knows the exact flexibility and strength of deers' hair, of otters' fur, of swans' down, or a terrier's stiff curls; of a horse's coat, of a bird's plumage. He could sweep you in a line, on a clean sheet of cartridge paper, and you would not only know at once what animal it was taken from, but you might almost augur at once what class of animal it was,-what was the temper, age, and "social position" of that animal. An eccentric crony of mine, when he wants to take the portrait of a friend, draws his legs and boots; and I would rather have a mouth of one of Landseer's dogs than a whole kennel drawn by a mere imitative and second-rate hand. Dogs, Sir Edwin paints as if he was their father,-paints them lovingly, chidingly, correctingly, upbraidingly, and sympathizingly. He seems to applaud the gentlemanly dog and condemn the low dog. Like a sly moralist, too, he gives us men quiet lessons of advice, while pretendingly only to be thinking of his dogs. His Jack in Office is a caution to all public servanta, whether insolent railway clerks or impertinent government employés. If, indeed, dogs could only think, or rather if they had newspapers, and could communicate their ideas at any length to each other, these moral lessons Landseer teaches might be of the greatest service to the dog world. Of all his dog pictures,-founded on dog portraiture,-Landseer's finest is the Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner,—an exquisite bit of pathos, eloquently lectured on by Mr. Ruskin. Landseer may be said to have immortalized the stag. He has done for it more than Snyders did for our old and not yet extinct friend, the boar. He has shown us the red deer in every phase of domestic life, and in every vicissitude of his existence,-from the time that he gores his rival of the herd to the day when he drips a dead crimson sop over the back of a rough Highland pony. He has shown us him in rain and sun, joy and sorrow, triumphant and defeated, trampling the moorland or dead in the forest ;-he has given us him as the greasy citizen, browsing about in the heather, and at bay in the Highland lake. He has given us the prose and poetry of deer life; but he has given us the prose in s way that only an artist-poet could do; and he has given us their poetry with a truth and vigour that the mere idealist could not approach. He makes us feel a human interest in the deer, such as the mere aldermanic gloater over a fat haunch heaving with parasite life could no more understand than he could the feelings of the ten thousand Greeks when they saw once more the sea. Every deer picture of Sir Edwin's is a poem: it is not a study of deer in several attitudes. He has given us his friends the deer looming spectrally through the mist; he has given us the two kings of the herd, with entangled antlers, dead in the early morning, on the top of some Highland mountain. We have from his hand the deer at bay, the deer worn out, the deer and the stalker, the does and their attendant fauns. If Sir Edwin were the Greek Acteon himself, and had been retransformed into an English artist, he could not know more of deer feelings and habits than he does now. He must have watched them long hours from behind granite blocks and fern clumps and slender birch trees, from stealing corners and from Gothic windows. He has associated them, too, so cleverly with the Scotch physiognomy,-the keen eyes, the high-shouldering cheek bones, the pinched, tight-holding to look forward, and look back; we think of what the man lips, the firm chin. In some of his pictures,-as, for instance, Bolton Abbey, that gorgeous bouquet of still life,-the figures are rather conventional landscape figures, sons of the lay figure, and daughters of the stagiest model extant among those original thinkers, the older R.A.'s. But this picture was an exception, for Sir Edwin's figures are generally admirable, and full of character;-his crouching gillies, all ear, his rejoicing clansmen and superannuated drovers to wit. Generally speaking, when not painting to order, which kills any one, Landseer has as keen a perception of character as Wilkie, and still more fire and life-blood genius in him than that cold, uninteresting, calculating man of talent. He has, too, a broader view of humanity, and paints like a healthy man of action, who has been a bold actor in all the scenes he paints. But, entangled among the multitudinous and varied works of a great man, already I find it better to leave the by-path of episode, and return into the broad and beaten road of general biography. has done, and prophesy no more what he will do. The year of his election, the greatest of Scotch painters since Wilkie exhibited his Poachers Deer Stalking, a robust picture, with the heads almost medieval in their grim concentrated strength. The same year appeared his Little Red Riding Hood, a picture of the Naughty Boy vein of feeling, both to my mind being quite equal to Reynolds's cat-like children, whose archness is exaggerated almost into affectation. 1852 saw his Hawking, a Bulwerian, conventional picture, but still alive in places. This year was also memorable for his Jack in Office, an admirable dog picture, full of character. It represents a low bull-dog of truculent disposition, and inflated by power, guarding a costermonger's dog's-meat cart, upon which he is enthroned. He is eyeing, with ferocious caution, a lean greyhound that is skulking suspiciously near the gateway where the barrow is moored. The colour is low in tone, but healthy and good: this dog figures in several of Sir Edwin's pictures. In 1833 appeared Sir Walter Scott and his Dogs, a popular picture, in which Sir Walter was rather eclipsed by Maida, and Pepper and Mustard, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart. In 1834, Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time, another Bulwerian convention, gave Landseer another opportunity, under the mask of spurious mediævalism, to empty his larder before the public; swans, salmon, deer,-all that flood and field could produce,-lay at the feet of some insipid monks and stagy peasants and retainers. The men were like Lance's men, the women of the La Sonnambula school; yet still the public forgave the sham monks for the sake of the dead zoological garden thus laid out with such Rubens' lavishness before them, and Bolton Abbey still remains a popular picture in print-shop windows. In 1826 appears Landseer's Hunting of Chevy Chase, by no means one of his best pictures, but rewarded, as past men's inferior works have generally been, by the doubtful honour of associateship with the Academy. Sufficient for that body that the rising man could not be trodden down; that the mechanical work was good, and the subject a popular one, that did not require any painful thought to comprehend it. A well-known engraver's son has seldom much difficulty in getting on in art if he has talent. Landseer was now only twenty-three, and already the world opened her arms to him, and rich men were glad to see so clever a man not too proud to paint their dogs and horses, and other incarnations of wealth. The genius was not too high-flown for them to understand. Had it been, Landseer might have died of poverty, like Spencer. In 1827 appeared another scene of Highland life,—High- | landers returning from Deer Stalking,-a processional picture, clever, but rather meagre and insipid to my own taste, though not without a certain sense of repose that is soothing and quieting. In 1828 came out another of the Æsopian monkey pictures,-The Monkey who had seen the World. Now, Sir Edwin's texture, finish, and material truth of surface does not suit fiction, and in all these fable pictures the real and ideal seem to me to jar very unpleasantly. "What is this creature who is aping humanity?" one says; is it a live model dressed up and placed in an attitude, or does the painter mean to give us a mere illustration of some old fable? The abstract animal that Æsop writes of becomes a mere dancing dog, or organ ape, when represented with such imitative, unmysterious, speakable fidelity. I much One of this painter's critics, in summing up his pictures, prefer to these clever but still rather vulgar clap-trap pictures divides them into classes: dramatic, as the Otter Speared; Landseer's real scenes, heightened by pathos and humour,- portraits, as the King Charles's Spaniels guarding the not the mere horn and dog views, but the Spearing the Otter, Cavalier's Hat, in the Vernon Gallery; or animal stories, as and There's Life in the Old Dog yet, which are, in fact, dra-Laying down the Law and Alexander and Diogenes, the matic tableaux of Highland sporting life, seen only for a former very artificial, the latter very full of character and moment, or only heard of by the painter, and therefore well contrasted. requiring dramatic selections, vigour of treatment, or an imaginative memory both reflective and luminous. In 1829 appeared the Illicit Highland Whisky Still; in 1830 Highland Music, a piper surrounded by dogs, worthy of Wilkie, and quite as well painted. The piper still blows out his cheeks for our delight in the Vernon Gallery at Brompton. In this picture the man is intensely Scotch, and quite as good as the dogs. In the same year Landseer illustrated a ballad of Scott's, and in a picture called Attachment, representing a dog, I think "Collie," keeping watch over his master, who has perished in the Helvellyn. In all these pictures there was a watchful observation of nature and a thoroughly natural tenacity in making out detail, though the colour was unequal, never brilliant, though sometimes rich and deep; and too often it was slaty, cold, and leaden, as it afterwards became irremediably. In 1831 Landseer was elected R.A., and about this time his mind seems to have reached its climax of ripeness, in texture, in colour, in composition, and more especially in invention, selection, and combination. The time had now come when he was to do his best; till that culminating period no man's mind can be measured. After that we cease In 1835, in the Drover's Departure, Landseer surpassed himself in a more congenial and imaginative subject, where the animals are admirable, but still properly merely subsidiary. The dog and monkey pictures, the portraits of animals, were all eclipsed by this admirable tableau of one of the exciting, eventful scenes in Highland life, the Return from Hawking. 1857 is a relapse again into drawing-room medievalism, from which, however, in the same year Land seer, ever right and true in his best instincts, broke away from in his justly-celebrated Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner,— a most touching episode, full of the peaceful poetry of humble life, and presenting in a delightful manner the ties of affection that sometimes bind the man and the animal. Except when he is spuriously medieval, Sir Edwin always knows how to touch the heart. Landseer has sold so large a part of his birthright for rich people's money and for fashionable distinction, has spent so much time in painting obscure spaniels and forgotten horses, that he has not produced so many original pictures of pure invention as he might have done had he faced life more boldly, and preserved his independence of thought and action, disdaining the blandishments of a class that can never have any real sympathy with men of intellect and action, whose very existence is a reproof to degenerate peers. At home among friends and brother workers he would have been a leader and king; in palaces he was but a clever dependent, employed to wile away an idle hour, or kept at a distance by the cold iron railing of court etiquette. In 1845 Landseer delighted the art world with his Pastoral Scene, and in 1846 with the companion pictures of Peace and War, now in the Vernon Gallery. These pictures, in which animals form a small yet important and artfully introduced part, are well known and popular. The War represents a dead cuirassier lying with his grim face turned to heaven in the ruins of a garden; the rose-entangled balcony of which and the wall lie among other smoking debris; all is chaos and sulphurous perturbation. Peace represents some pretty |