in the hayfield subject (Burchell and Sophia), displays
perhaps the most wonderful, because the most dignified, finish in the
expression of anatomy and covering--of muscle and hide at once, and
assuredly the most perfect unity of drawing and color, which the entire
range of ancient and modern art can exhibit. Albert Durer is indeed the
only rival who might be suggested; and, though greater far in
imagination, and equal in draughtsmanship, Albert Durer was less true
and less delicate in hue. In sculpturesque arrangement both masters show
the same degree of feeling: any of these dogs of Mulready might be taken
out of the canvas and cut in alabaster, or, perhaps better, struck upon
a coin. Every lock and line of the hair has been grouped as it is on a
Greek die; and if this not always without some loss of ease and of
action, yet this very loss is ennobling, in a period when all is
generally sacrificed to the great coxcombry of art, the affectation of
ease.

Yet Mr. Mulready himself is not always free from affectation of some
kind; mannerism, at least, there is in his treatment of tree trunks.
There is a ghastliness about his labored anatomies of them, as well as a
want of specific character. Why need they be always flayed? The hide of
a beech tree, or of a birch or fir, is nearly as fair a thing as an
animal's; glossy as a dove's neck barred with black like a zebra, or
glowing in purple grey and velvet brown like furry cattle in sunset. Why
not paint these as Mr. Mulready paints other things, as they are? That
simplest, that deepest of all secrets, which gives such majesty to the
ragged leaves about the edges of the pond in the "Gravel-pit." (No.
125.), and imparts a strange interest to the grey ragged urchins
disappearing behind the bank, that bank so low, so familiar, so sublime!
What a contrast between the deep sentiment of that commonest of all
common, homeliest of all homely, subjects, and the lost sentiment of Mr.
Stanfield's "Amalfi" the chief landscape of the year, full of exalted
material, and mighty crags, and massy seas, grottoes, precipices, and
convents, fortress-towers and cloud-capped mountains, and all in vain,
merely because that same simple secret has been despised; because
nothing there is painted as it is! The picture was a most singular
example of the scenic assemblage of contradictory theme which is
characteristic of Picturesque, as opposed to Poetical, composition. The
lines chosen from Rogers for a