Although we claim to ourselves no credit for heroism, in the free disclosure of our views on this important subject, yet we do not much wonder that the timidity of the author on this point should lead him to regard it as an effort of chivalry to declare an opinion on this question in New York, where the denial of the doctrine of contagion would scarcely fail to subject him to illiberal sarcasm and personal abuse in the public papers of that city. But we cannot agree with him that the discussion of this question is a mere dispute about words. It is true that the word contagion has often been loosely and inaccurately used. Still, whatever meaning may be attached to the term, the question remains, whether the yellow fever is disseminated by some property which is generated by the disease itself, or arises in each individual case from some cause, independent of the previous existence of the disease. And this question is of immense practical importance. Every measure of protection against the ravages of this desolating epidemic is deeply affected by it; and the propriety of the measure is determined by the correctness of the answer to the question. It is not a question of words merely, whether we are still to rely upon quarantines, and lazarettos, and non-intercourse, as our safeguard, or to seek out and remove such local objects as contaminate the purity of the atmosphere. It is not a question of words only, whether we may safely receive into our families those who are fleeing from before the pestilence, or whether we shall shut our doors upon them, lest we should share their danger of becoming its victims.

6. Everett,

ART. X.-Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst unter den Griechen. Von Friederich Thiersch, Zweyte Abhandlung, die Epoche der Kunstentwicklung enthaltend. München 1819. On the Epochs of the plastic Art among the Greeks, by Frederic Thiersch. The second essay containing the periods of the development of the art. A memoir read in a public meeting of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Munich, Oct. 12, 1819, on occasion of the birth day of his Majesty the King. 4to. pp. 76.*

We have taken the liberty in this article to use the expression 'the Art' in a sense which, though not common in English, is familiar on the continent, which will sufficiently define itself when it occurs, and which avoids an inconvenient periphrasis.

THERE is nothing perhaps, in which our country is so plainly deficient, as the means of pursuing the study of the subject, which is treated in this memoir; we might perhaps say, in general, as in the state of the fine arts. We have produced, it is true, some of the most celebrated modern painters, and have been able to retain some of them in their native land. To have given birth to West and Copley, and to possess Stuart and Allston, is certainly to have contri. buted our share and more than our share to the painting of the age. But this is not all, which we want, even for this one department of the arts. Public collections of the great masters and valuable cabinet pieces from their immortal pencils are unknown among us; and of course the acquisition of the liberal ideas awakened by their inspection and study, forms no part of a finished education in our country. It would be preposterous to charge that upon us as a wanton neglect, or a piece of voluntary vandalism, which is wholly unavoidable. It is well known that pictures of any considerable interest are not to be bought in Europe, except by mere chance, and at enormous prices: and though great estates are certainly acquired in our country, yet it must be remembered that they are charged with a burden, unknown in the feudal families of the old world, the custom of an equal distribution among a family of children. One picture of Raphael would exceed in price a son's patrimony or a daughter's portion, in the richest family of the United States. A hundred years ago, the little Corregio at Dresden, a picture not a foot square, was sold for 13,000 gold ducats, and when a certain powerful monarch told the Duke of Tuscany that he would give him 8000 crowns for the Madonna della Seggiola at Florence, the duke replied that for another such picture, he would give his majesty 80,000. The small picture of Acteon belonging to the late Mr. West and ascribed to Titian, but which we have high authority for doubting to be that master's, it is fresh in the knowledge of our readers, sold for about 8000 dollars; while Mr. West refused 50,000 for his own last picture but one. In this state of things, it is evident that the people of America must give up the homely practice of making more than one child comfortable in the world, or they must say with the mother of the Gracchi, these are my pictures ;' and let the Titians and the Raphaels remain in Europe.

From another great source we are also cut off, from which the public collections and the galleries of the great have sometimes been replenished in Europe. Our armies have had no Ausonian, no Andalusian regions to sweep. From our contests with the Seminoles and Winnebagoes, we bring back nothing better than hard blows, and cessions of wild lands, and return from arduous campaigns without picture or statue. This certainly is not our fault, but the inherent vice of the warfare: and of those abroad who reproach us for not coming back from Tippecanoe or Pensacola, as richly laden with works of art as a French army from Italy, or an English general from Spain, we can only ask whether they think this is voluntary on our part, and say as Demosthenes did to the Athenians of Philip: Is there any one so foolish as to suppose that Philip really prefers the beans and vetches of the miserable villages of Thrace, to the Athenian mines and arsenals? This o ly we think we can answer for, that there is already taste enough in our country to prize such precious booty should any chance of war throw it in our power, though there would be respectable precedents for being insensible to their worth. Honest Mummius, who sacked Corinth, has perhaps been laughed at too much, for telling the soldiers, to whom he gave in charge the pictures of Parrhasius, that if they injured or lost them, they should restore others as good. At least there seems a milder species of barbarism in this, than prevailed in the army of the illustrious Gustavus Adolphus, that Lion of the North whom Major Dalgetty has so extensively introduced to our readers, whose refined Swedes cut the pictures of Corregio from their frames, to cover their baggage wagons withal; which said pictures, that they might do every possible service, were afterwards nailed up, to keep the snow out of her majesty of Sweden's stables. For all which proofs of interest in the arts, the honest Swedes have been remembered by the amateurs, in much the same affectionate way, that the rocket-maker at Alcala, who wrought up the Greek manuscripts of the Complutensian polyglott, into cartridges for his fireworks, has been remembered by the biblical critics.

But though it must be confessed that we are deficient in the means of forming or diffusing a highly cultivated taste in painting in our country, something may yet be hoped, something may gradually be done, even in the ancient school;

while the modern really bids fair to flourish among us. With regard to ancient pictures, a few occasionally find and will find their way to our shores: and we have observed with great pleasure, that the exhibitions at Philadelphia have sometimes been enriched by the loan of valuable specimens of the ancient masters from the gallery of the distinguished stranger, in that neighbourhood, who probably possesses more treasures of this description, than are to be found throughout the rest of the United States. Small pictures of interest of the Dutch school are not very rare among us, and whatever of this kind does reach our shores is happily likely to remain. At least, we hope, that the calculation, which not many years ago exported two reputed pictures of Salvator Rosa from America to London, will not be often repeated.

The modern school of painting, as we have said, bids fair to flourish among us, and that not merely from flattering pretty faces and appealing to personal vanity, but in the historic department of the art. We hope we do not go out of our way to pay a compliment to our fellow citizen, who has now founded upon a series of works, that have stood the test of English and of American criticism, the reputation of being the first historical painter living. We should be glad to have the work of Cammucini at Rome, or Girard at Paris, or David at Brussels indicated, that deserves to be preferred to Mr. Allston's Uriel, Jacob's Vision, or Jeremiah. In England, certainly he has left behind him no rival in this branch of his art.

In architecture and statuary, the two other great departments of the art, little has been done among us of an original character: more in architecture, as might have been expected, than in statuary, since we must have houses, churches, capitols, and theatres. But little as we have done upon the whole, we have perhaps even bere done our share. Modern Europe has produced scarce a building, which is approved by nice judges. Each new architect seems inspired with a zeal to add one more to the list of buildings in false taste, which he with all the world condemns ; and when one has wandered through the streets of Rome, and gazed on the theatric al curves, and false fronts of Borromini, built up almost under the shadow of the Pantheon, it seems an undue severity to sneer at our transatlantic rudeness. St. Peter's itself is the glory and shame of the art. An edifice of ordinary dimen

sions, a common parish church, which should retain in exact miniature the proportions and plan of St. Peter's, would havẹ Do claim to the praise of extraordinary beauty. It is the power of man, pili: g these wonderful masses in the air, suspending a cupola of a bundred and twenty feet diameter, and of sides twenty-two feet in thickness, at a distance of three or four hundred feet from the ground, and finding he means to resist this portentous gravitation; it is this, and the bazen columns of the canopy, the ample walls incrusted with beautiful marbles, the vast extent of the edifice, whose side chapels accommodate a worshipping congregation; the curious Mosaics with which it is lined: the gorgeous monuments and mausoleums of popes, and princes, and fugitive sovereigns; the reputed ashes of apostles and martyrs in the vaults; the banks of the Tiber, on which it stands, and a portion of that enthusiasm, which clings to the name of Rome; with the remembrance of the labours of centuries, and the treasures of kingdoms exhausted on the mighty pile; it is all this, which contributes not a little to the admiration with which St. Peter's is viewed. But this belongs to the region of sentiment, or association, and not the arts. It is mechanics and not architecture, the powers of enginery, not the principles of taste which piled the dome of St. Peter's on pillars, each as large as a common house. This is not the architecture which we wish to have in our country. The Egyptians had more of it, when they rolled their colossal stones up the sides of the pyramids. The Druids on Salisbury plain had as much, when they piled up the enormous masses of Stone-henge, unless we believe Inigo Jones, who saith in his work on that paradoxical fragment of antiquity, that with good engines and by the grace of God, he could raise stones as great or greater. In fact, we think, that the remark of Visconti with regard to St. Peter's, diffident as we should feel in contradicting any serious opinion of that illustrious archaiologist, has scarce any merit, but its smart. nes. It is well known that St. Peter's requires for its preservation considerable annual repairs. The foundation under the front, notwithstanding the efforts which have been made, at various times, to strengthen it, was from the first so imperfectly laid, that a large crack runs up and down one of the gigantic pilasters or rather pillars of the front. The cupola also has opened in several places. To prevent the increase of these defects, constant repairs are necessary. When