ect of the Crown Lawyers.--It was about
this time, or a little earlier, that Dan. Stuart made that curious
confession to us, that he had "never deliberately walked into an
Exhibition at Somerset House in his life."

BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART

Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty
years, or since the humour of exhibiting began, that has treated a
story _imaginatively_? By this we mean, upon whom his subject has
so acted, that it has seemed to direct _him_--not to be arranged by
him? Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have impressed
themselves so tyrannically, that he dared not treat it otherwise,
lest he should falsify a revelation? Any that has imparted to his
compositions, not merely so much truth as is enough to convey a story
with clearness, but that individualising property, which should keep
the subject so treated distinct in feature from every other subject,
however similar, and to common apprehensions almost identical; so as
that we might say, this and this part could have found an appropriate
place in no other picture in the world but this? Is there anything in
modern art--we will not demand that it should be equal--but in any
way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful bringing
together of two times in the "Ariadne," in the National Gallery?
Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr rout about him, re-peopling and
re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond
the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at the
Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story an
artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in
his harmonious version of it, saw no further. But from the depths of
the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it
contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the
desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid
with the presence and new offers of a god,--as if unconscious of
Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning
pageant--her soul undistracted from Theseus--Ariadne is still pacing
the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same
local solitude, with which she awoke at day-break to catch the forlorn
last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.

Here are two points miraculously co-uniting; fierce society, with
the feel