color of the paintings seems, as much as possible, to
participate in it; they are mostly of a misty, stony green, dismal hue,
as if they had been painted in a world where no color was. In every
picture, there are, of course, white mantles, white urns, white columns,
white statues--those oblige accomplishments of the sublime. There are
the endless straight noses, long eyes, round chins, short upper lips,
just as they are ruled down for you in the drawing-books, as if the
latter were the revelations of beauty, issued by supreme authority, from
which there was no appeal? Why is the classical reign to endure? Why is
yonder simpering Venus de' Medicis to be our standard of beauty, or the
Greek tragedies to bound our notions of the sublime? There was no reason
why Agamemnon should set the fashions, and remain [Greek text omitted]
to eternity: and there is a classical quotation, which you may have
occasionally heard, beginning Vixere fortes, &c., which, as it avers
that there were a great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may
not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to
succeed him. Shakspeare made a better man when his imagination
moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by
Prometheus, the blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian
poet, does not Milton's angel surpass AEschylus's--surpass him by "many a
rood?"

In the same school of the Beaux Arts, where are to be found such a
number of pale imitations of the antique, Monsieur Thiers (and he ought
to be thanked for it) has caused to be placed a full-sized copy of "The
Last Judgment" of Michel Angelo, and a number of casts from statues
by the same splendid hand. There IS the sublime, if you please--a new
sublime--an original sublime--quite as sublime as the Greek sublime. See
yonder, in the midst of his angels, the Judge of the world descending in
glory; and near him, beautiful and gentle, and yet indescribably august
and pure, the Virgin by his side. There is the "Moses," the grandest
figure that ever was carved in stone. It has about it something
frightfully majestic, if one may so speak. In examining this, and the
astonishing picture of "The Judgment," or even a single figure of it,
the spectator's sense amounts almost to pain. I would not like to be
left in a room alone with the "Moses." How did the artist live amongst
them, and create them? How did he suffer the painful labor of invention?
One fancies th