Like Alexander, who forbade all sculptors but Lysippus to carve his image, she prohibited all but special cunning limners from drawing her effigy. This was in 1653, anno regni 5, while, though no chicken, she still was not clean past her youth. This order was probably intended to prevent caricatures. At last, she quarrelled with her looking-glass, as well as her painters, and her maids of honour removed all mirrors from her apartments, as carefully as Ministers exclude opposition papers (we hope not Maga) from the presence of our most gracious Sovereign. It is even said, that those fair nettles of India, took advantage of her weakness, to dress her head awry, and to apply the rouge to her nose, instead of her cheeks. So may the superannuated eagle be pecked at by daws. But the tale is not probable. After all, it is but the captious inference of witlings and scoffers, that attributes to mere sexual vanity that superstitious horror of encroaching age, from which the wisest are not always free. It may be, that they shrink from the reflection of their wrinkles, not as from the despoilers of beauty, but as from the vaunt-couriers of dissolution. In rosy youth, while yet the brow is alabaster-veined with Heaven's own tint, and the dark tresses turn golden in the sun, the lapse of time is imperceptible as the throbbing of a heart at ease. "So like, so very like, is day to day," one primrose scarce more like another. Who ever saw their first grey hairs, or marked the crow-feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a momentous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the soul, a thought that youth is flown for ever? None but the blessed few that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the shedding of their vernal blossoms, a promise that the season of immortal fruit is near. It is a frailty, almost an instance of humanity, to aim at concealing that from others, of which ourselves are painfully conscious. The herculean Johnson keenly resented the least allusion to the shortness of his sight. So entirely is man a social animal, so dependent are all his feelings for their very existence upon communication and sympathy, that the "fee griefs," which none but ourselves are privy

to, are forgotten as soon as they are removed from the senses. The artifices to which so many have recourse to conceal their declining years, are often intended more to soothe themselves, than to impose on others. This aversion to growing old is specially natural and excusable in the celibate and the childless. The borrowed curls, the pencilled eyebrows,

"The steely-prison'd shape,

So oft made taper, by constraint of tape," the various cosmetic secrets, wellknown to the middle ages, not only of the softer sex, are not unseemly in a spinster, so long as they succeed in making her look young. They are intolerable in a mother of any age. But we, my dear Christopher, resigned and benevolent old bachelors as we are, can well appreciate the vanity of the aged heart, that sees not its youth renewed in any growing dearer self. Nothing denotes the advances of life, at once so surely and so pleasantly as children springing up around a good man's table. Perhaps our famous Queen, in her latter days, though full of honours as of years, would gladly have changed places with the wife of any yeoman that had a child to receive her last blessing, whose few acres were not to pass away to the hungry expecting son of a hated rival. Her virginity was not like that of Jephthah's daughter, a freewill offering to the Lord. Pride, and policy, and disappointment, and, it may be, hopeless, self-condemned affection, conspired to perpetuate it. Probably it was well for England that no offspring of hers inherited her throne. By some strange ordinance of nature, it generally happens that these wonderful clever women produce idiots or madmen. Witness Semiramis, Agrippina, Catherine de Medicis, Mary de Medicis, Catherine of Russia, and Lady Wortley Montague. One miniature of Elizabeth I have seen, which, though not beautiful, is profoundly interesting; it presents her as she was in the days of her danger and captivity, when the same wily policy, keeping its path, even while it seemed to swerve, was needful to preserve her life, that afterwards kept her firm on a throne. Who was the artist that produced it? I know not: but it bears

the strongest marks of authenticity, if to be exactly what a learned spirit would fancy Elizabeth-young, a prisoner, and in peril-be evidence of true portraiture. There is pride, not aping humility, but wearing it as a well-beseeming habit; there is passion, strongly controlled by the will, but not extinct, neither dead nor sleeping, but watchful and silent; brows sternly sustaining a weight of care, after which a crown could be but light; a manly intellect, allied with female craft ;-but nonsense! it will be said; no colours whatever could represent all this, and that, too, in little, for the picture was among Bone's enamels. Well, then, it suggested it all. Perhaps the finest Madonna ever painted, would be no more than a meek, pious, pretty woman, and an innocent child, if we knew not whom it was meant for.

Little as genuine art was cultivated or encouraged under Elizabeth, portrait, which, in strict speech, is historical, contra-distinguished from poetical, painting was not neglected. The features of most of her worthies, warriors, statesmen, poets, and divines, have been recorded with fidelity, or at least with much verisimilitude. There is a decided cast of countenance, a family likeness, in all the subjects of Elizabeth and James, which can no more be mistaken than described. It is not that sameness which an unimaginative dauber cannot help impressing on a generation of sitters-it is not the "foolish face" transmitted through a whole pedigree of country gentlemen-it is not the generic likeness of a breed-the gentilitious contour of a nation. Every face has its own character, and the degrees of beauty and ugliness are abundantly varied. Shakspeare is as unlike Darnley as Darnley is unlike Cecil, or Queen Eliza beth is unlike the Scottish Mary. But so is the style of Shakspeare's dramas utterly different from Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, or Burleigh's State Papers; yet it is manifestly the style of the same period. The analogy holds good with regard to the style of features and expres. sion. If any one, having the opportunity, which, alas! I have not, will examine Lodge, Vertue, or any wellengraved series of portraits, or a decent gallery of family pictures, he

will verify an observation, which words can but ill convey, and argument cannot prove. The Elizabethan physiognomy prevailed, with slight variation in the generic character, through the reign of her successor, and in the court of Charles the First, though the superior genius of Vandyke superadded to that character a grace, a life, power, action, thought, fire, and generosity, that was his own. The Cavaliers, however, with few exceptions, were men of more honour than principle-more passionate than meditative-more elegant than profound. We may vainly regret that Spenser, Sidney, Shakspeare, Raleigh, Bacon, had not a Vandyke to draw them. Of the Puritans, such as were gentlemen preserved, beneath the cropped heads and high-crowned hats, the ancient English contour, though the free play and transparency of looks are gone. Heaven help the Puritans had the Long Parliament, and the Assembly of Divines, been permitted to realize their ideal in church and state! Ere one generation had passed away, not a pretty woman would have existed between John-o'Groat's house and Lizard Point. To see the havoc which Puritanism makes in the loveliest faces, even after they are fully formed, what would be its effect on plastic infancy-how would it intensify itself by traduction!

Another race of visages came in with the Restoration, and yet another with the House of Hanover. We are ourselves a fourth; but this is anticipation. Who were the artists who pourtrayed the luminaries of the Maiden reign, is not exactly recorded. As economy was the order of the day, few foreigners seem to have been tempted across the Channel. We read, however, of one Lucas de Heere, a native of Ghent, a poet, a painter, and wit, who visited England, and executed several portraits. He was employed to paint the gallery of the Earl of Lincoln, in which, among other allegorical emblems of nations, as the representative and express image of Anglicism, he drew a naked man, with a pair of shears, and various coloured cloths! His witticism, which is manifestly descended from the ass and trusses of hay, was borrowed from Andrew Borde's Induction to Knowledge,

ship was worth purchasing, foreign states assiduously paid homage to his taste, and instead of ivory puzzles and diamond snuff-boxes, the usual free will offerings of diplomacy, presented him with Tintorets and Titians. But Catholic artists were slow in accepting his invitations; nor is it surprising that they shunned a country where the multitude were taught to consider their genius a crime, and where their religion was a statutable offence. Yet Rubens, protected by the sacro-sanctity of an Ambassador, partook a while of his hospitality, and adorned Whitehall with the apotheosis of James the First. Rubens was the Claudian of painters, the pictorial laureate; the splendour of his colouring, and the vigour of his design, disguises the nothingness of his subject. His pictures put you in mind of a vast parterre of thick-set carnations and anemonies-a glowing brochure of double-daisies. Every thing is rich and voluptuous, but all seems over-fed, and forced. Men, women, beasts, virtues, and deities, are fattened like prize oxen for a show. Rubens is Titian Dutchified. I should like to know whether he ever drank canary with Ben Jonson -they would have agreed admirably, unless, indeed, they were too blunt for one another. By far the most interesting of Rubens' pictures are his portraits of himself and his wives; -he was worth a score of French dukes and cardinals; and to have been the spouse of such a man, was better than being the unloved consort and early widow of the over-lauded apostate hero of the Henriade. But Rubens is not to be ranked among English painters. There is a luxurious negation of common sense in his court allegories, that does not amalgamate with our national character. The genius of England is essentially dramatic. No people are so intensely individualized as the English. Every Englishman is a definite self, and sympathizes with his fellow-creatures, not as portions of a constituted whole, but as organized microcosms. The self-love of an Englishman is not selfishness-it is the light which instructs how to love his neighbour. He, not alone, but perhaps more than other men,

knows and feels, that the very meanest child of Adam-a labourer bowed to earth with daily toil-an infant at the breast a little lassie singing as she carries her eggs to market-is a more express image of the great Creator, than all the innumerable orbs of lifeless matter that throng infinity; that all the abstract perfection which philosophers have dreamed, is not half so good as the everyday goodness which human life is always needing. He that talks of "stooping to truth," either talks nonsense, or tries to puzzle his hearers with irreverent irony, and at all events, does not speak good English.

This spirit of individuality has had a strong and shaping power over our literature. Perhaps the most striking instances of it are to be found in works where it would be least expected. We do not wonder that Chaucer and Shakspeare should have individualized their characters-it was their business, their poetic duty, so to do. But that Spenser and Bunyan (start not, good reader, they are well worthy to be mentioned together) should have made mere abstractions as substantially familiar to the imagination as if they were living members of our domestic circles,-that they should have turned personifications into bona fide persons-and clothed the dry bones of allegory with vital flesh-and shewn fairy land-and the valley of the shadow of death-and the delectable mountains, that figure the calm of a Christian death-bed, the counterpart of blessed immortality, as vividly, yea palpably, as our own birth-place appears in our happiest dreams, bespeaks a might of love that never was bestowed by mortal passion-which dimly shadows the creative orgasm of the Eternal. I know not whether that partiality for portrait, of which historical painters are given to complain, is not à necessary result of the peculiar constitution of British society, but certainly we are more interested in our own and our neighbour's faces, than in the finest combinations of line and colour. Hence Vandyke, Lely, and Kneller, though foreigners by birth, may justly be recorded among English artists, for they are the illustra tors of our history. To the taste of

King Charles, and the successful mediation of Sir Kenelm Digby, inventor of

"the famed Hermetic powder, Which wounds five miles point-blank would solder,"

we are indebted for our Vandykes. Happy was the painter who was summoned, not to take an inventory of blue eyes, arched eyebrows, Grecian noses, rosy-mouthed and dimpled chins, insipid prettiness, and ugly no-meaning-not to register charms uninteresting to all but lovers, or set nature's faults in a note-book-not to cheat oblivion of her due, and tell the world that folly and vanity wrote as legible a hand two centuries back as at the present day-but to realize the narration of Clarendon-to justify the panegyrics of Waller-to shew how they looked upon earth, whose spirits speak to us from the grave. But most happy are we, who, with hearts as tranquil as the mute image of departed sorrow, I can look on the likenesses of the illustrious dead, and read their sad but ever glorious story, and, wondering, ask ourselves if such things really

were.

Of Vandyke's merits as a painter, I profess not to discourse. Mr Cunningham has, doubtless, done him justice. He calls him the Delineator of Intellect; and says that his men are superior to his women-" who have not the fresh innocent loveliness of nature." But art has its limits. I do not think the fresh innocent loveliness of nature can be painted: The innocence of life looks silly in a picture-a painted smile is at best an immoveable simper, and laughter stares out of the canvass like idiot drunkenness; you might as well attempt to sketch the corporeal dimensions of a sound, to tell the colour of a thought, or represent a forgotten dream in perspective, as to depict those charms that would not charm were they not for ever on the wing. The beauty of painters is of a grave, steadfast character; they can give the permanent expression of conscious thought, and trace the lines of habitual feeling, but when they try to perpetuate the transiency of emotions that are coeval with the moment, they vie in absurdity with the Virtuoso, who

took out a patent for crystallising moonshine.

Moreover, it is to be recollected that Vandyke was the recorder of an ominous season. The shadow of the time was cast on every countenance. I can scarce think the babies smiled, as now they smile. The face of Charles himself is a prophecy of his doom; and his fair Queen has eyes that seem made for tears-a bosom swelling with anticipated woe.

Vandyke died just before the storm broke out. As a portrait-painter, he was probably less obnoxious to the ruling party than some of his brethren in art would have been; yet he would not long have escaped the calumny which all and every thing noble and elegant partook with the royal patron. The love of art was ranked among Charles's heaviest crimes; and sad it is to think that many who loved art themselves, prompted or echoed the malignant outcry, which the vulgar got by rote out of Puritan sermons. Would it were forgotten that Milton ever was the yoke-fellow of Hugh Peters, the reviler of down-trampled majesty, and the salaried flatterer of Cromwell! Yet, perhaps, it is best that it be not forgotten; for it is good that all men should know, that neither the sublimest genius, nor the sternest virtue, can purify the inherent baseness of rebellious faction. Wordsworth, in a better sonnet than Milton ever trumpeted, addresses the soul of his great prototype as "a star that dwelt apart;" alas, that fine poetry should not always be true! For many years it dwelt with all the servile imps which the archfiend rebellion flatters and scorns, with rage-with slander-with sacrilege

with passions that turn our milk to gall-with sundering of domestic charities-with power which sweet religion never sanctified-with the foul despotism of anarchy. I would not be thought deficient in reverence to names that still are mentioned in a breath with liberty. What has been we know-what might have been, if Charles and his bishops had been allowed to work their will, we can but guess. To the dearest freedom of the human soul, the indefeasible prerogative of conscience, the Episcopalians and Presbyterians were alike hostile. Both presumed to