the lifeless body; she rent her hair, and tried to lay violent
hands upon herself, long refusing all sustenance. From her incoherent
words, they at length gathered something of her story, and the
probable fate of the rest of her tribe. Some of the woodmen
immediately started in hopes of rendering assistance to the unhappy
Montaignais; they found six of the families on their way, in the last
stage of starvation, and saved them, but all the rest of the tribe
perished in that barren land.

The following night the woodmen dug a hole, and laid the mangled
corpse to rest. It was so light and emaciated, that a child might have
borne it thither. They then heaped some snow over it, and, threading
their way by torchlight through the trees back to their huts, left it
without a blessing. So there he sleeps--unwept, save by the poor
Indian girl! his fate for years unknown to those who had wondered at
his gifts and beauty. His bones lie whitening in that distant land, no
friendly stone or sod to shelter them from the summer sun and wintry
frost.

Let us yet dare to hope, that in those last dark days of toil and
suffering, where life and death were in the balance, He, whose love is
infinite, may have made the terrible punishment of this world the
furnace wherein to melt that iron heart, and mould it to His ends of
mercy.

WAS RUBENS A COLOURIST?

I do not ask if Rubens was a man of genius. I am only questioning the
title, which has been so generally conferred upon him, of a colourist.
I am aware that a host of artists and connoisseurs will rather admire
the audacity of making the inquiry, than pursue it, through the
necessary disquisition, into the true principles of art. It may be
possible that the taste of the English school, and of our English
collectors, may have become to a degree vitiated. And with regard to
the former, the artists, (and I say it without at all denying their
great abilities,) it may be very possible, nay, it is certain, that
any vitiation of taste must be a blight upon their powers, natural or
acquired, however great. I believe this very reputation of Rubens as
the great colourist, has been extensively injurious to the British
School of Art, (if there be such a _school_.) It has been so often
repeated, that artists take it up as an established fact, not to be
denied; and have too blindly admired, and hence endeavoured (though
for lack of the material they have failed) to imitate him in this one
de