and human character, in a manner which indefinitely enhances their
suggestiveness. Horace Walpole wove a standard collection of anecdotes
from the lives and works of painters. The frescoes of St. Mark's, at
Florence, have a peculiar significance to the spectator familiar with
Fra Angelico's life. One of the most pathetic and beautiful tragedies
in modern literature is that which a Danish poet elaborated from
Correggio's artist career. Lamb's great treasure was a print from Da
Vinci, which he called "My Beauty," and its exhibition to a literal
Scotchman gave rise to one of the richest jokes in Elia's record. The
pen-drawing Andre made of himself the night before his execution,--the
curtain painted in the space where Faliero's portrait should have been,
in the ducal palace at Venice,--and the head of Dante, discovered by Mr.
Kirkup, on the wall of the Bargello, at Florence,--convey impressions
far beyond the mere lines and hues they exhibit; each is a drama, a
destiny. And the hard but true lineaments of Holbein, the aërial grace
of Malbone's "Hours," Albert Durer's mediaeval sanctities, Overbeck's
conservative self-devotion, a market-place by Ostade, Reynolds's
"Strawberry Girl," one of Copley's colonial grandees in a New England
farmer's parlor, a cabinet gem by Greuze, a dog or sheep of Landseer's,
the misty depths of Turner's "Carthage," Domenichino's "Sibyl," Claude's
sunset, or Allston's "Rosalie,"--how much of eras in Art, events
in history, national tastes, and varieties of genius do they each
foreshadow and embalm! Even when no special beauty or skill is manifest,
the character of features transmitted by pictorial art, their antiquity
or historical significance, often lends a mystery and meaning to the
effigies of humanity. In the carved faces of old German church choirs
and altars, the existent facial peculiarities of race are curiously
evident; a Grecian life breathes from many a profile in the Elgin
marbles, and a sacred marvel invests the exhumed giants of Nineveh; in
the cartoons of Raphael, and the old Gobelin tapestries, are hints