ace of all the days I have to live?"--
Yet gave it all the same.

Alas! thou foolish one,--alike unfit
For healthy joy and salutary pain,
Thou knowest the chase useless, and again
Turnest to follow it.

The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art

The object we have proposed to ourselves in writing on Art, has been
"an endeavour to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the
simplicity of nature; and also to direct attention, as an auxiliary
medium, to the comparatively few works which Art has yet produced in
this spirit." It is in accordance with the former and more prominent
of these objects that the writer proposes at present to treat.

An unprejudiced spectator of the recent progress and main direction
of Art in England will have observed, as a great change in the
character of the productions of the modern school, a marked attempt
to lead the taste of the public into a new channel by producing pure
transcripts and faithful studies from nature, instead of
conventionalities and feeble reminiscences from the Old Masters; an
entire seeking after originality in a more humble manner than has
been practised since the decline of Italian Art in the Middle Ages.
This has been most strongly shown by the landscape painters, among
whom there are many who have raised an entirely new school of natural
painting, and whose productions undoubtedly surpass all others in the
simple attention to nature in detail as well as in generalities. By
this they have succeeded in earning for themselves the reputation of
being the finest landscape painters in Europe. But, although this
success has been great and merited, it is not of them that we have at
present to treat, but rather to recommend their example to their
fellow-labourers, the historical painters.

That the system of study to which this would necessarily lead
requires a somewhat longer and more devoted course of observation
than any other is undoubted; but that it has a reward in a greater
effect produced, and more delight in the searching, is, the writer
thinks, equally certain. We shall find a greater pleasure in
proportion to our closer communion with nature, and by a more exact
adherence to all her details, (for nature has no peculiarities or
excentricities) in whatsoever direction her study may conduct.

This patient devotedness appears to be a conviction peculiar to, or
at least more purely followed by, the early Italian Painters; a