evade or defeat it at all events. It might appear, that with him inversion is the order of nature. Trifles light as air, are' to his understanding, confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ:' and he winks and shuts his apprehension up to the most solemn and momentous truths as gross and vulgar errors. His political creed is of an entirely fanciful and fictitious texture-a kind of moral, religious, political, and sentimental filligre-work: or it is made up of monstrous pretexts, and idle shadows, and spurious theories, and mock-alarms. Hence his gravest reasonings have very much an air of concealed irony; and it might sometimes almost be suspected that, by his partial, loose, and unguarded sophisms, he meant to abandon the very cause he professes to magnify and extol.1 It is indeed, his boast, his pride, his pleasure, to make the worse appear the better reason,' which he does with the pertness of a school-boy and the effrontery of a prostitute: he assumes indecent postures in the debate, confounds the sense of right and wrong by his licentious disregard of both, puts honesty out of countenance by the familiarity of his proposals, makes a jest of principle,-'takes the rose from the fair forehead of a virtuous cause, and plants a blister there.'

The House of Lords does not at present display much of the aristocracy of talent. The scene is by no means so amusing or dramatic here as in the House of Commons. Every speaker seems to claim his privilege of peerage in the awful attention of his auditors, which is granted while there is any reasonable hope of a return: but it is not easy to hear Lord Grenville repeat the same thing regularly four times over, in different words-to listen to the Marquis of Wellesley who never lowers his voice for four hours from the time he begins, nor utters the commonest syllable in a tone below that in which Pierre curses the Senate-Lord Holland might have other pretensions to alacrity of mind than an impediment of speech, and Lord Liverpool might introduce less of the vis inertia of office into his official harangues, than he does. Lord Ellenborough was great in the extremity of an oath.' Lord Eldon, his face 'twixt tears and smiles contending,' never loses his place or his temper. It is a pity to see Lord Erskine sit silent, who was once a popular and powerful speaker; and when he does get up to speak, you wish he had said nothing. This nobleman, the other day, on his return to Scotland after an absence of fifty years, made a striking speech on the instinctive and indissoluble attachment of all persons to the country where they are born,-which he considered as an innate and unerring

1 See his panegyric on the late King, his defence of the House of Commons, and his eulogy on the practical liberty of the English Constitution in his Liverpool Dinner Speech.

principle of the human mind; and, in expatiating on the advantages of patriotism, argued by way of illustration, that if it were not for this original dispensation of Providence, attaching, and, as it were, rooting every one to the spot where he was bred and born,-civil society should never have existed, nor mankind have been reclaimed from the barbarous and wandering way of life, to which they were in the first instance addicted! How these persons should become attached by habit to places where it appears, from their vagabond dispositions, they never stayed at all, is an over-sight of the speaker which remains unexplained. On the same occasion, the learned Lord, in order to produce an effect, observed that when, advancing farther north, he should come to the old playground near his father's mansion, where he used to play at ball when a child, his sensations would be of a most affecting description. This is possible; but his Lordship returned homewards the next day, thinking, no doubt, he had anticipated all the sentiment of the situation. This puts one in mind of the story one has heard of Tom Sheridan, who told his father he had been down to the bottom of a coal-pit. Then, you are a fool, Tom,' said the father. Why so, Sir?' 'Because,' said the other, it would have answered all the same purpose to have said you had been down!'

HAYDON'S CHRIST'S AGONY IN THE GARDEN' The London Magazine.]

[May, 1821.

We have prefixed to the present number an engraved outline of this picture (which we hope will be thought satisfactory), and we subjoin the following description of it in the words of the artist's catalogue.

'Christ's Agony in the Garden.-The manner of treating this subject in the present picture has not been taken from the account of any one Apostle [Evangelist] in particular, but from the united relations of

the whole four.

'The moment selected for the expression of our Saviour is the moment when he acquiesces to (in) the necessity of his approaching sacrifice, after the previous struggle of apprehension.

"Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.”

'It is wished to give an air of submissive tenderness, while a quiver of agony still trembles on his features. The Apostles are resting a little behind, on a sort of garden-bank; St. John in an unsound doze -St. James in a deep sleep-St. Peter has fallen into a disturbed slumber against a tree, while keeping guard with his sword, and is on the point of waking at the approach of light. Behind St. Peter, and 481

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stealing round the edge of the bank, comes the mean traitor, Judas, with a centurion, soldiers, and a crowd; the centurion has stepped forward from his soldiers (who are marching up) to look with his torch, where Christ is retired and praying; while Judas, alarmed lest he might be surprised too suddenly, presses back his hand to enforce caution and silence, and crouching down his malignant and imbecile face beneath his shoulders, he crawls forward like a reptile to his prey, his features shining with the anticipated rapture of successful treachery.

It is an inherent feeling in human beings, to rejoice at the instant of a successful exercise of their own power, however despicably directed.

"The Apostles are supposed to be lit by the glory which emanates from Christ's head, and the crowd by the torches and lights about them.'

The printed catalogue contains also elaborate and able descriptions of Macbeth, the murder of Dentatus, and the judgment of Solomon, which have been already before the public.

We do not think Christ's Agony in the Garden the best picture in this collection, nor the most striking effort of Mr. Haydon's pencil. On the contrary, we must take leave to say, that we consider it as a comparative failure, both in execution and probable effect. We doubt whether, in point of policy, the celebrated artist would not have consulted his reputation and his ultimate interest more, by waiting till he had produced another work on the same grand and magnificent scale as his last, instead of trusting to the ebb of popularity, resulting from the exhibition of Christ's Entrance into Jerusalem, to float him through the present season. It is well, it may be argued, to keep much before the public, since they are apt to forget their greatest favourites: but they are also fastidious; and it is safest not to appear always before them in the same, or a less imposing, attitude. It is better to rise upon them at every step, if possible (and there is yet room for improvement in our artist's productions), to take them by surprise, and compel admiration by new and extraordinary exertions -than to trust to their generosity or gratitude, to the lingering remains of their affection for old works, or their candid construction of some less arduous undertaking. A liberal and friendly critic has, indeed, declared on this occasion, that if the spirits of great men and lofty geniuses take delight in the other world, in contemplating what delighted them in this, then the shades of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Correggio, can find no better employment than to descend again upon the earth, once more teeming with the birth of high art, and stand with hands crossed, and eyes uplifted in mute wonder, before

Mr. Haydon's picture of Christ's Agony in the Garden. If we believed that the public in general sympathised seriously in this sentiment, we would not let a murmur escape us to disturb it ;—the opinion of the world, however erroneous, is not easily altered; and if they are happy in their ignorance, let them remain so ;-but if the artist himself, to whom this august compliment has been paid, should find the hollowness of such hyperbolical commendation, a hint to him, as to its cause in the present instance, may not be thrown away. The public may, and must, be managed to a certain point; that is, a little noise, and bustle, and officious enthusiasm, is necessary to catch their notice and fix their attention; but then they should be left to see for themselves; and after that, an artist should fling himself boldly and fairly into the huge stream of popularity (as Lord Byron swam across the Hellespont), stemming the tide with manly heart and hands, instead of buoying himself up with borrowed bloated bladders, and flimsy newspaper paragraphs. When a man feels his own strength, and the public confidence, he has nothing to do but to use the one, and not abuse the other. As his suspicions of the lukewarmness or backwardness of the public taste are removed, his jealousy of himself should increase. The town and the country have shown themselves willing, eager patrons of Mr. Haydon's AT HOME:--he ought to feel particular obligations not to invite them by sound of trumpet and beat of drum to an inferior entertainment; but, like our advertising friend, Matthews, compass sea, earth, and air,' to keep up the eclat of his first and overwhelming accueil! So much for advice; now to

criticism.

We have said, that we regard the present performance as a comparative failure; and our reasons are briefly and plainly these following: -First, this picture is inferior in size to those that Mr. Haydon has of late years painted, and is so far a falling-off. It does not fill a given stipulated space in the world's eye. It does not occupy one side of a great room. It is the Iliad in a nutshell. It is only twelve feet by nine, instead of nineteen by sixteen; and that circumstance tells against it with the unenlightened many, and with the judicious few. One great merit of Mr. Haydon's pictures is their size. Reduce him within narrow limits, and you cut off half his resources. His genius is gigantic. He is of the race of Brobdignag, and not of Lilliput. He can manage a groupe better than a single figure he can manage ten groupes better than one. He bestrides his art like a Colossus. The more you give him to do, the better he does it. Ardour, energy, boundless ambition, are the categories of his mind, the springs of his enterprises. He only asks ample room and verge enough.' Vastness does not confound him, difficulty rouses him,

impossibility is the element in which he glories. He does not concentrate his powers in a single point, but expands them to the utmost circumference of his subject, with increasing impetus and rapidity. He must move great masses, he must combine extreme points, he must have striking contrasts and situations, he must have all sorts of characters and expressions; these he hurries over, and dashes in with a decided, undistracted hand;-set him to finish any one of these to an exact perfection, to make a hand, an ear, an eye,' that, in the words of an old poet, shall be worth an history, and his power is gone. His forte is in motion, not in rest; in complication and sudden effects, not in simplicity, subtlety, and endless refinement. As it was said in the Edinburgh Review, Mr. Haydon's compositions are masterly sketches;-they are not, as it was said in Blackwood's Magazine, finished miniature pictures. We ourselves thought the Christ in the triumphant Entry into Jerusalem, the least successful part of that much admired picture: but there it was lost, or borne along in a crowd of bold and busy figures, in varied or violent actions. Here it is, not only the principal, but a solitary, and almost the only important figure: it is thrown in one corner of the picture like a lay figure in a painter's room; the attitude is much like still-life: and the expression is (in our deliberate judgment) listless, feeble, laboured, neither expressing the agony of grief, nor the triumph of faith and resignation over it. It may be, we are wrong: but if so, we cannot help it. It is evident, however, that this head is painted on a different principle from that of the Christ last year. It is wrought with care, and even with precision, in the more detailed outlines: but it is timid, without relief, and without effect. The colour of the whole figure is, as if it had been smeared over, and neutralized, with some chalky tint. It does not stand out from the canvas, either in the general masses, or in the nicer inflections of the muscles and surface of the skin. It has a veil over it, not a glory round it. We ought, in justice, to add, that a black and white copy (we understand by a young lady) of the head of Christ has a more decided and finer apparent character. To what can this anomaly be owing? Is it that Mr. Haydon's conception and drawing of character is good, but that his mastery in this respect leaves him, when he resigns the portcrayon; and that, instead of giving additional force and beauty to the variations of form and expression, by the aid of colour and real light and shade, he only smudges them over with the pencil, and leaves the indications of truth and feeling more imperfect than he found them? We believe that Mr. Haydon generally copies from nature only with his port-crayon; and paints from conjecture or fancy. If so, it would account for what we have here considered as a difficulty. We