y the
certainty of means which would have been within his reach! and we should
not have had to regret, as we often do in looking at some of his best
pictures, that somewhat heavy labouring after a brilliancy and a power not
always compatible, and perhaps not then attainable, which shows that his
mind was thoroughly imbued with a full sense of the excellency of the
great masters, but that he wanted such a work as the learning, the
research, and discriminating judgment of Mr Eastlake now offers for the
study and practice of every professor of the art. To these notes are added
some interesting remarks by our author upon the effects of the recipes
with which the pictures were painted, as they are now visible in the works
themselves.

This book could not have appeared at a more fit time. The English school
is becoming of too great importance to waste any of its powers any longer
in the perishing and weak materials of our various meguilps; and the
German school may be arrested by it in their backward progress to the old,
quaint, dry method which the old masters themselves quitted as soon as the
improvements of the Van Eycks, and the modifications of those improvements
by their successors, established upon a basis for immortality painting in
oil.

We must forbear, lest our readers may be wearied with the name of varnish,
and may think we resemble that unfortunate painter, who, bewildering his
wits upon the subject, became deranged, and varnished his clothes with
turpentine varnish, and went in this state shining through the streets.

LE PREMIER PAS.

There appears to be something pedantical in criticising a popular
proverb--something vexatious in calling in question the sort of ancestral
wisdom it is supposed to contain--in disputing a truth, which has been
formalised and accepted by the general assent and perpetual iteration, at
all hours of the day, by all sorts of talkers. Besides, who knows not that
a proverb is not a logical statement? It is always a one-sided view of the
matter, so that the most opposite of proverbs may be equally true; it
gains its currency, and its very force and pungency, by a bold exclusion
at once of all that qualification, and exception, and limitation, which
your exact thinkers require. We will not, therefore, enter into any
profane or captious dispute of one of the most current of the whole family
of proverbs, that which assigns so great a value to the _premier pas_, to
the first step