of himself, from his own hand, on the inner side of the binding of an old volume of his Table Talk. It was a capital likeness. I went one day with him to the Water-Color Exhibition in Suffolk Street. He did not seem much pleased upon the whole. He repeated an old pun, declaring that he disliked Westall even more than all West.

We then went to the National Gallery. He had no sooner entered the front room up-stairs, than his face brightened, and he exclaimed, "Now I am at home!" The living, breathing, speaking portrait of Gevartius on his right-the rich allegorial landscape by Rubens directly facing him-the Claudes, Poussins, and other immortal works glowing on the walls on every side of us, seemed to hold his faculties in enchantment. On our way home we passed a shop-window, in which were two large engravings from landscapes by Turner. "Ah, I once thought," said he, that Turner would have been a second Claude. But he has disappointed me. There is something imposing in his style, but there is no repose in it. It is theatrical, fluttery, flaunting-it is any thing but Claude-like now. I dislike him, too, as a man.

After all, perhaps, Hazlitt did great injustice to Turner. That artist is not all that Hazlitt might desire, but I am inclined to think that he is still the best landscape painter in England. He is not a Claude, it is true, but if he wants Claude's repose and grace he has more spirit and versatility. If you have seen one of Claude's pictures you have seen them all, exquisite as they are. There is a great sameness and mannerism in them. Some years ago I saw two or three capital pictures by Turner, at the public exhibition of Paintings, got together by the Calcutta Brush Club. I remember that one of them was a view of Shakspeare's Cliff. Beautifully and naturally, and yet with something of an audacious spirit, a darkened boat was placed on the very edge of a patch of sunshine. The effect was magical. Turner's contrasts are strikingly felicitous-miracles of art. He has studied the finest and rarest aspects of nature with a determination to startle and delight us until we are almost "dazzled and drunk with beauty."

L.-Does he not sometimes flatter nature ?

R.-Oh that's impossible! I have often looked upon a few feet of weeds and water glittering in the setting sun, and felt how their beauty would have defied the most exquisite colorist that ever lived. There is, indeed, exaggeration in painting, as there is bombast in poetry, but no poet or painter has yet done full justice to moral beauty, or to the loveliness of external nature. L.-Painters may improve upon particular and individual specimens, by a judicious selection from boundless varieties, or by new and tasteful combinations; though, of course, Nature in the abstract cannot be surpassed by Art.

R. The painting by Turner to which I have been alluding, must have been finished before he changed his style of coloring, and, to the mortification of his admirers, made all his pictures look as if they had been smeared over with the yolk of an egg. He has taken it into his head to look at nature through a pair of yellow spectacles.

L.-I think he too often shows an insolent confidence in his own genius. He takes liberties with Nature. He does not think, with Thomson, that when unadorned she is adorned the most. He is not satisfied with simple beauty, but attempts to gild refined gold and paint the lily. This wasteful and ridiculous excess, is a pretty strong indication of an unsound judgement. There is almost always something meretricious about him. You know Martin? What sort of person is he.

R.-A most amiable man in private life. He is small in person, but well proportioned; he has a fine curly head of hair, and his face is what women call handsome. It is almost pretty. His manners are pleasing, but too modest to be quite easy. He is not at all the sort of person in appearance that people acquainted with his paintings only are apt to fancy. His countenance is deficient in dignity and force. This however rather supports the opinion of those critics who maintain that there is in reality no strength of genius in his productions. His mind is not a great one if his features speak the truth.

L.-There is something too like trickery in Martin's vast

architectural perspective. Perhaps it was only a lucky first hit; almost any one can repeat it. He has no other resource. If he has sublimity, it is what Coleridge would call the material sublime. His enormous buildings make pigmies of men and angels. The Almighty himself is insignificant in Martin's illustrations of Milton. With him high walls seem more interesting than heroic hearts; he prefers matter to mind; his very heavens are hard and rocky. They are like rough quarries, or horrid cliffs and caverns with patches of glaring light or black shadow.

R.-That Martin is a mannerist is not to be denied. But so is every great painter-and poet too. Has not Milton a manner -noble I grant-but yet a manner? He could not have written plays like Shakspeare, or a mock-heroic poem like that of Pope. It is enough for one man to strike out a new style and to excel all other men in it. This Martin has done.

L. His engravings have an infinitely finer effect than his paintings, for he is a very tasteless colorist. He is "gaudy not neat." He engraves all his own pictures, and I must say with great skill and freedom. What do you say of Westall?

R-He is too affected. His paintings remind me of the colored prints of shepherds and shepherdesses in fancy costume. They are silly sentimental pastorals. Westall was employed by the booksellers to illustrate Milton's Paradise Lost:-could anything be more ill-judged. Fuseli's extravagancies were bad enough, but they were never feeble. Westall's pictures are sometimes pretty, but they are never powerful. He is a drawing-room artist.

L.—If you do not admire Westall's softness perhaps you like Prout's roughness.

R.-Prout is a nobler artist than Westall; but still he is not a great favorite of mine. He has boldness and breadth of style, but no sentiment or elevation. He is a clever mechanic. He represents admirably what he sees with his fleshly eye, and nothing more. He is the Crabbe of painters.

L.-Did you ever see any of Chinnery's productions?

R.-Yes-there was and perhaps still is a vile portrait of Lord Hastings by Chinnery, in the mess-room at Dum Dum.

His Lordship is made to look like an image carved in wood. All Chinnery's portraits at least all that I have seen-are hard and coarse. But perhaps I have only seen his earlier productions. Some friends of Chinnery have taken me to task for what they call my prejudice against him as a portrait painter. His landscapes, I admit, are spirited and masterly.

L.-Why, I have always heard him very highly spoken of as a painter of portraits in oils, and a lady of taste was telling me the other day, that his water color miniatures were truly exquisite. What versatility he must possess !

R. I cannot believe it. I know of no artist who is equally excellent in different departments of his art. Turner is aware that he is no portrait painter, and Lawrence rarely tried his hand at a landscape. Martin piles up gorgeous palaces with a magician's art, but cannot draw man or woman; and Claude, you know, used to get his brother artists to put figures into his landscapes. But I do not wish to speak unkindly of Chinnery. He is not merely a capital Landscape Painter. I am told that he is also a wit of the first water. His puns are "profuse of pleasantness." He is now in China, and was for many years in Calcutta. We have had other English painters of eminence in this quarter of the globe. Beechey (the younger) is still here. Home and Havell were both sojourners, I think, in the City of Palaces. Zoffani was in Bengal for many years. He lived at Serampore, where there are still some of his paintings. He was a German, but seems to have preferred England to his native country. He commenced his professional life in London, by painting the portraits of his Landlord and Landlady, which he exposed on the street door of his lodgings. These caught the eye of Garrick, who was so pleased with them that he ordered a portrait of himself, in the character of Abel Drugger. This portrait brought the artist into great notice. Sir Joshua Reynolds bought it for 100 guineas. Sir Joshua subsequently sold it to the Earl of Carlisle for 150 guineas, and handsomely presented the additional 50 guineas to the artist. He was patronized, too, by Hogarth, who recognized something of a kindred genius in him. He had great power

in depicting character. His dramatic portraits were particularly admired. Zoffani painted the whole Royal family of England in one large picture. While in India he painted some pictures for the King of Oude. He returned to England with a large fortune in 1790, and died there in 1810.

L.-The other day I was turning over the beautifully illustrated pages of Rogers's Poems and Turner's Annual Tour, and had a good opportunity of comparing two artists of such different endowments as Turner and Stothard. It is odd that Rogers should have brought them into such immediate contrast and collision in the illustration of his poetry. Stothard's designs, though executed in his extreme old age, are full of grace, spirit, and invention.

R. I used to think that his figures had always something false and even absurd about them. He was apparently actuated by a most intense desire to produce classical effects, but he failed from sheer timidity. His style seemed injured by an effeminate fastidiousness, a morbid sensibility. In his horror of straight lines, and his love of curves, he was inclined to exaggerate a grace into a caricature, and make his figures unnaturally round and fantastically elegant. But certainly there was a vast improvement in his latest productions. I think it is Leigh Hunt who says that Stothard was one of the few English artists esteemed on the continent; and, if I remember rightly, he gives it as his opinion that a female figure by Stothard, amongst the illustrations of Chaucer in Bell's British Poets, would have delighted Raffaelle himself. I do not think there is any falling off in Turner's genius as an original artist, though he has gone astray as a colorist. His invention is as rich and true as ever. Look at the engravings, in which you see his designs unstained with false colors. How exquisite they are! There is nothing tawdry or theatrical in them. What poetical sentiment! What lively contrasts, and yet what breadth of effect! But never before, perhaps, were pictures transferred to steel for bookembellishments with such success. The burine here rivals the brush in purity and depth of tone. The perspectives are quite