We have taken the present opportunity to offer these remarks on the necessity of acting the plays of our great Bard, in spirit and substance, instead of burlesquing them, because we think the stage has acquired in Mr. Kean an actor capable of doing singular justice to many of his finest delineations of character.

FINE ARTS-THE LOUVRE

The Morning Chronicle] [March 24, 1814. IF Blücher, if the Cossacks, get to Paris,-to Paris, the seat of Bonaparte's pride and insolence,-what mercy will they shew to it, or why should they shew it any mercy? Will they spare the precious works of art, to decorate the palace of a monster whom they justly detest? Will they treat the Thuileries more tenderly than the French Officers, only eight months ago, openly threatened to treat Berlin? Is Paris, Bonaparte's Paris, more sacred than Moscow or are the slaves of the Corsican more inviolable than the brave and virtuous citizens of Hamburgh? No, no; the indignant warriors will cry,—

"Away to Heav'n respective Lenity,

And fire-eyed Fury be my conduct now."

'There is no other mode by which the Parisians can disarm the vengeance which now so closely impends over them, than by disclaiming for ever him whose crimes have been the just cause of that vengeance. Paris under the white standard, returning to loyalty and virtue, may be spared by a generous conqueror ;-but Paris, identified with Bonaparte, must partake all the vindictive sentiments which are attached to that hateful name.

[Yet some time ago this writer assured us that if the French people identified themselves with Bonaparte, they ought not to be separated from him.]

In what momentous times do we live! Perhaps, the famous city of which we speak may even now be laid in ashes! Perhaps and more welcome be the omen, it may have returned to its allegiance, and proclaimed its native Sovereign, and set a price on the head of that wicked rebel who still dares to call himself the Emperor of France.'-Times, March 17.

'Nay, if you mouth, I'll rant as well as you!'

It is a pity to spoil this morsel of Asiatic eloquence, so worthy of the subject and the sentiments; but the evident meaning of it is, that

the French must expect to do penance in sack-cloth and ashes, or consent to put on the old livery jackets, made up for them by our army-agents long ago, and which have unfortunately lain on hand ever since. If so, they must needs be pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall.' Yet we hardly know what to say to the chivalrous and classical politicians of the Stock Exchange. They are not driven to the extremity of Gothic rage by the ranking inveteracy, and old unsatisfied grudge of the Pitt-school. Yet surely no pitiable enthusiast that

'Scrawls

With desperate charcoal on his darken'd walls,'

can be more incorrigible to reason. They are always setting out on their way to Paris from Moscow, while the Pitt-school studiously return to join Lord Hawkesbury in the year 1793, or they think the whole ceremony incomplete! The treaty of Pilnitz does not stand between our modern popular incendiaries and their just revenge! They live only in this present ignorant time!' They see the white standard of the Bourbons waving over the walls of Paris, unspotted with the blood of millions of Frenchmen! They do not seem ever to have known, or (with our poet-laureat) they forget, that the same standard to which our milky politicians advise the French people, sick of destruction, and panting for freedom, to fly for deliverance and repose, is that very standard, which, for twenty years, hovering round them, now seen like a cloudy speck in the distance -now spreading out its drooping lilies wide, has been the cause of that destruction-has robbed them at once of liberty and of repose!

Moscow is, however, the watch-word of the renegados of The Times. It seems to them just that Paris should be sacrificed to revenge the setting fire to Moscow by the Russians, and that the monuments of art in the Louvre ought to be destroyed because they are Bonaparte's. No; they are ours as well as his ;-they belong to the human race; he cannot monopolize all genius and all art. But these madmen would, if they could, blot the Sun out of heaven, because it shines upon France. They verify the old proverb, Tell me your company, and I'll tell you your manners!' They, no more than their friends the Cossacks, can perceive any difference between the Kremlin and the Louvre. There is at least one difference, that the one may be built up again, and the other cannot. For there, in the Louvre, in Bonaparte's Louvre, are the precious monuments of art-the sacred pledges which human genius has given to time and nature;-there stands the statue that enchants the world;' there is the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Dying

Gladiator, the Head of the Antinous, Diana with her Fawn, and all the glories of the antique world;

'There is old Proteus coming from the sea,

And wreathed Triton blows his winding horn.

There, too, are the two St. Jeromes, Corregio's and Dominichino's ; there is Raphael's Transfiguration, the St. Mark of Tintoret, Paul Veronese's Marriage of Cana, the Deluge of Nicholas Poussin, and Titian's St. Peter Martyr ;-all these, and more than these, of which the world is scarce worthy. Yet all these amount to nothing in the eyes of those virtuosos the Cossacks, and their fellow-students of The Times! What's Hecuba to them, or they to Hecuba?' But we must be allowed to see with our own eyes, and to have certain feelings of our own. We will not be brayed by these quacks like fools in a mortar. We too, as Mr. Burke expresses it, have real feelings of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms.' We look up with awe to Kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility.' But all this is a machine that goes on of itself, and may be repaired if out of order. We bow willingly to Lords and Commoners, though we know that breath can make them as a breath has made.' Blücher, Wittgenstein, Winzingerode, and Ktzichigoff, are true heroes; their names become the mouth well, and rouse the ear as the sound of a trumpet; but they are the heroes of a day, and all that they have done might be as well done by others to-morrow. here it is: once destroy the great monuments of art, and they cannot be replaced. Those mighty geniuses, who have left their works behind them an inheritance to mankind, live but once to do honour to themselves and their nature. But once put out their light, and there is no Promethean heat that can their light relumine.' Nor ought it ever to be re-kindled, to be extinguished a second time by the harpies of the human race. What have 'the worshippers of cats and onions' to do with those triumphs of human genius, which give the eternal lie to their creed? We would therefore recommend these accomplished pioneers of civilisation and social order, after they have done their work at the Louvre, to follow the river-side, and they will come to a bare inclosure, surrounded by four low walls. It is the place where the Bastille stood: let them rear that, and all will be well. And then some whiffling poet who celebrated the fall of that monument of mild paternal sway-that sacred ark of the confidence of Kings-that strong bulwark of time-hallowed laws,' and precious relic of the good old times,' in an ode, may hail its restoration in a sonnet!

But

WILSON'S LANDSCAPES, AT THE BRITISH

The Champion.]

INSTITUTION

[July 17, 1814. THE landscapes of this celebrated artist may be divided into three classes; his Italian landscapes, or imitations of the manner of Claude, his copies of English scenery, and his historical compositions.

The first of these are, in our opinion, by much the best; and of the pictures of this class in the present collection, we should, without any hesitation, give the preference to the Apollo and the Seasons, and to the Phaeton. The figures are of course out of the question(Wilson's figures are as uncouth and slovenly as Claude's are insipid and finical)-but the landscape in both pictures is delightful. In looking at them we breath the very air which the scene inspires, and feel the genius of the place present to us. In the first, there is all the cool freshness of a misty spring morning: the sky, the water, the dim horizon all convey the same feeling. The fine grey tone, and varying outline of the hills, the graceful form of the retiring lake, broken still more by the hazy shadows of the objects that repose on its bosom; the light trees that expand their branches in the air, and the dark stone figure and mouldering temple, that contrast strongly with the broad clear light of the rising day, give a charm, a truth, a force and harmony to this landscape, which produce the greater pleasure the longer it is dwelt on. The distribution of light and shade resembles the effect of light on a globe.

The Phaeton has the dazzling fervid appearance of an autumnal evening; the golden radiance streams in solid masses from behind the flickering clouds; every object is baked in the sun;--the brown foreground, the thick foliage of the trees, the streams shrunk and stealing along behind the dark high banks, combine to produce that richness, and characteristic propriety of effect, which is to be found only in nature, or in art derived from the study and imitation of nature. The glowing splendour of this landscape reminds us of the saying of Wilson, that in painting such subjects, he endeavoured to give the effect of insects dancing in the evening sun. His eye seemed formed to drink in the light. These two pictures, as they have the greatest general effect, are also more carefully finished in the particular details than the other pictures in the collection. This circumstance may be worth the attention of those who are apt to think that strength and slovenliness are the same thing.

Cicero at his Villa is a clear and beautiful representation of nature.

The sky is admirable for its pure azure tone. Among the less finished productions of Wilson's pencil, which display his great knowledge of perspective, are A Landscape with figures bathing, in which the figures are wonderfully detached from the sea beyond; and A View in Italy, with a lake and a little boat, which appear at an immeasurable distance below:-the boat is diminished to

'A buoy almost too small for sight.'

A View of Ancona; Adrian's Villa at Rome; a small blue greenish landscape; The Lake of Neimi; a small, richly-coloured landscape of the banks of a river; and a landscape containing some light and elegant groups of trees, are masterly and interesting sketches. A View on the Tiber, near Rome, a dark landscape which lies finely open to the sky; and A View of Rome, are successful imitations of N. Poussin. A View of Sion House, which is hung almost out of sight, is remarkable for the clearness of the perspective, particularly in the distant windings of the River Thames, and still more so for the parched and droughty appearance of the whole scene. The air is adust, the grass burned up and withered: and it seems as if some figures, reposing on the level, smooth shaven lawn on the river's side, would be annoyed by the parching heat of the ground. We consider this landscape, which is an old favourite, as one of the most striking proofs of Wilson's genius, as it conveys not only the image, but the feeling of nature, and excites a new interest unborrowed from the eye, like the fine glow of a summer's day. There is a sketch of the same subject, called A View on the Thames.

A View near Llangollen, North Wales; Oakhampton Castle, Devonshire; and The Bridge at Llangollen, are the principal of Wilson's English landscapes. They want almost every thing that ought to recommend them. The subjects are not fit for the landscape-painter, and there is nothing in the execution to redeem them. Ill-shaped mountains, or great heaps of earth, trees that grow against them without character or elegance, motionless water-falls, a want of relief, of transparency, and distance,-without the imposing grandeur of real magnitude (which it is either not within the province of the art to give, or which is certainly not given here), are the chief features and defects of these pictures. The same general objections apply to Solitude, and to one or two pictures near it, which are masses of common-place confusion. In near scenes, the effect must depend almost entirely on the difference in the execution, and the details: for the difference of colour alone is not sufficient to give relief to objects placed at a small distance from the eye. But in Wilson there are commonly no details; all is loose and general; and this very circumstance, which assisted him