ing of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations, with
the accidents of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the
_present_ Bacchus, with the _past_ Ariadne; two stories, with double
Time; separate, and harmonising. Had the artist made the woman one
shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had she expressed a
rapture at his advent, where would have been the story of the mighty
desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid accident of a
flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for
Theseus was not lightly to be pieced up by a God.

We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael in
the Vatican. It is the Presentation of the newborn Eve to Adam by the
Almighty. A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier
sire perhaps of men since born. But these are matters subordinate to
the conception of the _situation_, displayed in this extraordinary
production. A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied with
tempering certain raptures of connubial anticipation, with a suitable
acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the
first bridegroom; something like the divided attention of the child
(Adam was here a child man) between the given toy, and the mother
who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the
first-sight view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade,
considering the awful presence they were in, would have taken care
to subtract something from the expression of the more human passion,
and to heighten the more spiritual one. This would be as much as an
exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset House to last year's
show, has been encouraged to look for. It is obvious to hint at a
lower expression, yet in a picture, that for respects of drawing
and colouring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these
art-fostering walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety-nine,
the gratitude as one, or perhaps Zero! By neither the one passion nor
the other has Raphael expounded the situation of Adam. Singly upon his
brow sits the absorbing sense of wonder at the created miracle. The
_moment_ is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-conscious
of his art, in which neither of the conflicting emotions--a moment how
abstracted--have had time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous
mastery.--We have seen a landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in
which he aimed at delineating a fic