finished." His head hangs down--cold, pale death being imprinted upon every
feature of the face. It is perhaps a painfully-deadly countenance: copied,
I make no doubt, from nature. St. Anne, Mary, and St. John, are the only
attendants. The former is quite absorbed in agony--her head is lowly
inclined, and her arms are above it. (The pattern of the drapery is rather
singular). Mary exhibits a more quiet expression: her resignation is calm
and fixed, while her heart seems to be broken. But it is in the figure and
countenance of _St. John_, that the artist has reached all that an artist
_could_ reach in a delineation of the same subject. The beloved disciple
simply looks upwards--upon the breathless corpse of his crucified master.
In that look, the world appears to be for ever forgotten. His arms and
hands are locked together, in the agony of his soul. There is the sublimest
abstraction from every artificial and frivolous accompaniment--in the
treatment of this subject--which you can possibly conceive. The background
of the picture is worthy of its nobler parts. There is a sobriety of
colouring about it which Annibal Caracci would not have disdained to own. I
should add, that there is a folding compartment on each side of the
principal subject, which, moving upon hinges, may be turned inwards, and
shut the whole from view. Each of these compartments contains one of the
two thieves who were crucified with Our Saviour. There is a figure of S.
Lazarus below one of them, which is very fine for colour and drawing.

The last, in the series of old pictures by German masters, which I have
time to notice, is an exceedingly curious and valuable one by CHRISTOPHER
AMBERGER. It represents _the Adoration of the Magi_. There are throughout
very successful attempts at reflected light; but what should set this
picture above all price, in my humble estimation, is a portrait--and the
finest which I remember to have seen--of MELANCTHON:--executed when he was
in the vigour of life, and in the full possession of physiognomical
expression. He is introduced in the stable just over those near the Virgin,