," when first
exhibited; French soldiers enjoy the minutiae of Vernet's battle-pieces;
a lover can judge of his betrothed's miniature; and the most unrefined
sportsman will point out the niceties of breed in one of Landseer's
dogs. To the want of correspondence so frequent between the subject of a
picture and the observer's experience may, therefore, be attributed no
small degree of the prevalent want of sympathy and confident judgment.
"Gang into an Exhibition," says the Ettrick Shepherd, "and only look at
a crowd o' cockneys, some with specs, and some wi' quizzing-glasses, and
faces without ae grain o' meaning in them o' ony kind whatsomever, a'
glowering, perhaps, at a picture o' ane o' Nature's maist fearfu' or
magnificent warks! What, I ask, could a Prince's-Street maister or
missy ken o' sic a wark mair than a red deer wad ken o' the inside o'
George's-Street Assembly-Rooms?"

The incidental associations of pictures link them to history, tradition,
and human character, in a manner which indefinitely enhances their
suggestiveness. Horace Walpole wove a standard collection of anecdotes
from the lives and works of painters. The frescoes of St. Mark's, at
Florence, have a peculiar significance to the spectator familiar with
Fra Angelico's life. One of the most pathetic and beautiful tragedies
in modern literature is that which a Danish poet elaborated from
Correggio's artist career. Lamb's great treasure was a print from Da
Vinci, which he called "My Beauty," and its exhibition to a literal
Scotchman gave rise to one of the richest jokes in Elia's record. The
pen-drawing Andre made of himself the night before his execution,--the
curtain painted in the space where Faliero's portrait should have been,
in the ducal palace at Venice,--and the head of Dante, discovered by Mr.
Kirkup, on the wall of the Bargello, at Florence,--convey impressions
far beyond the mere lines and hues they exhibit; each is a drama, a
destiny. And the hard but true lineaments of Holbein, the aerial grace
of Malbone's "Hours," Albert Durer's mediaeval sanctities, Overbeck's
conservative self-devotion, a market-place by Ostade, Reynolds's
"Strawberry Girl," one of Copley's colonial grandees in a New England
farmer's parlor, a cabinet gem by Greuze, a dog or sheep of Landseer's,
the misty depths of Turner's "Carthage," Domenichino's "Sibyl," Claude's
sunset, or Allston's "Rosalie,"--how much of eras in Art, events
in history, national tastes, and va