gets my living by making drawings. I makes 'em in pencil.'-I asked him if he took portraits.-'I does every line, portraits and all; but I don't get many portraits since the daguerreotype came in. No, Sir, my drawings are principally in the sporting line. I does portraits of gentlemen going over a fence or a five-barred gate. I does 'em all in pencil, and puts a little color on their faces, but all the rest in pencil-d'ye see?'-'Yes; but do you make a good living? Well, not much of that; I used to earn a good deal more money when I did portraits at sixpence each than I do now.'-I said, 'I suppose you begin to see that you can do better, and it takes you longer.'' That's just it; you've hit it, Sir. I used to knock them off in a quarter or half an hour, and now it takes me seven or eight days to do a sporting piece.'-So I told the poor man that I would willingly give him advice, but I was afraid it would ruin him completely, for that afterwards he would have to take two or three months.-'Yes, Sir, I sees that; but I am too old now to learn a new line. But I find trees very hard; I can't manage them.'-So I sat down, and drew a branch of a tree, which he said was very much in his style; and I gave him some advice which I thought might help him, and the good man went away so much obliged." When the news of Mr. Seddon's death reached England, it was at once felt by his friends that it was due to his memory that the public should be made better acquainted with the excellence of his works. An exhibition of them was accordingly made, and a subscription raised for the benefit of his widow, by purchasing his large picture of Jerusalem, to be presented to the National Gallery. The subscription was successful, and Seddon's fame is secure. dramatic effect. In Mr. Seddon's works, the primal object is to place the spectator, as far as Art can do, in the scene represented, and to give him the perfect sensation of its reality, wholly unmodified by the artist's execution." Mr. Ruskin's judgment will not be questioned by those who have seen Seddon's pictures. But it might also be added, that such accuracy as he attained is by no means the result of mere laborious and conscientious copying, but implies and requires the possession of strong and well-balanced imagination. We trust that the extracts we have given may lead lovers of Art to read the whole of the little volume from which they are taken. Passages from my Autobiography. By SYDNEY, LADY MORGAN. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1859. AGED sportiveness is not seductive, and we do not become slaves at the tap of a fan, when the hand that holds it is palsied and withered. We have in the volume before us the melancholy spectacle of an aged female of quality setting her cap at everybody. When an old woman makes up her mind to be young, she invariably overdoes it. The gypsy horse-dealers, when they have a particularly ancient horse to dispose of, administer a nostrum to the animal, which has the effect of keeping him continually in motion, and bestowing on him a temporary vivacity which a colt would hardly exhibit. Lady Morgan is unnecessarily frisky. The gypsy's horse, when the effect of the medicine has passed off, becomes more aged and infirm than ever. What a terrible reaction must have been the lot of this old lady, after all the capers she had cut in these passages from her autobiography! A great, great, great, long time ago, as the story-tellers say, when novels were few and far between, and an Irish novel was a thing almost unheard of, a smart, self-educated Irish girl, of, we believe, rather humble origin, discovered that she had a knack at writing, and, having published a cleverish novel, called "The Wild Irish Girl," was taken up by great people, exploited, made the fashion, and had Sir Charles Morgan, a physician of some standing, given her for a husband. She continued to write. Her work on France made some noise, on account of its having been prohibited by the French government; and her subsequent book on Italy, if not profound, was at least sprightly. Her Irish novels were, however, her best productions. There is considerable observation, and some feeling, displayed in them. Her knowledge of Irish society is very exact, and her pictures of it very slightly exaggerated. "The O'Briens and O'Flahertys " and "Florence MacCarthy" are, perhaps, the best of her works of fiction. At this period, Lady Morgan possessed a rather interesting appearance, great audacity, and a certain reckless style of conversation, which was found to be piquant by the jaded gossips of the metropolis. She was taken up by London society,-which must always be taking up something, whether it be a chimney-sweep that composes music, or an elephant that dances the valse à deux temps; and she fluttered from party to party, a sort of Tom Moore in petticoats, with this difference, that Moore left his meek little wife at home, while Lady Morgan trotted her husband out after her on all occasions. It is amusing to observe what pains the poor woman takes to persuade us that Sir Charles is a monstrous clever man. Betsy Trotwood never labored harder to convince the world of the merits of Mr. Dick, than Lady Morgan does to obtain a place for her husband as a learned philosopher who was in advance of his age, or, as she prettily expresses it in French, (she likes to parade her French, this excellent wife,) "il devançait son siècle." This mania for inlaying her writing with French scraps rises with her Ladyship to a species of insanity. "Est il possible that I am going to Italy?" she exclaims. How much more forcible is this than the vulgar "Is it possible?" When the Duke of Sussex comes into a party, he does not excite anything so commonplace as a great sensation; no, it is a “grand mouvement!" Praise bestowed on her is an "éloge." She would not condescend to speak of such things as foldingdoors, they are better as "grands battants." A change of scene is a changement de décoration." Mrs. Opie, whom she sees at a party, is not in full dress, but "en grand costume." The three Messrs. Lygon 66 look very "hautain." And while driving with Lady Charleville, instead of having a charming conversation on the road, her Ladyship has it "chemin faisant." Allons, mi lady! you prefer that style of writing. Chacun à son gout! Mais we, nous autres, love mieux the plain old Saxon langue. If Lady Morgan had called this volume "Passages from my Card-Basket," there would have been some harmony between the title and the contents. The three hundred and eighty-two pages are for the most part taken up with frivolous notes from great people, either inviting her Ladyship to parties or apologizing for not having called. These are interspersed with a number of philoprogenitive letters to Lady Clarke,-her Ladyship's sister,— in which, being childless herself, she expends all her bottled-up maternity on her nephews and nieces. The little pieces of autobiography scattered here and there are painfully vivacious. The poor old lady smirks and capers and ogles, until one becomes sick of this sexagenarian agility. Paris beheld no more melancho ly spectacle than that of poor old Madame Saqui dancing on the tight-rope for a living at the age of eighty-five, and displaying her withered limbs and long white hair to a curious public. We do not feel any particular degree of veneration for that Countess of Desmond "who lived to the age of a hundred and ten, and died of a fall from a cherry-tree then," as Mr. Thomas Moore sings. Well, Lady Morgan dances on any amount of literary tightropes, and climbs any number of intel lectual cherry-trees. It is a sight more surprising than pleasant; and her Ladyship must not be astonished that the critics should not treat her with the respect due to her age, when she herself labors so hard to make them forget it. Bitter-Sweet. A Poem. By J. G. HOLLAND, Author of "The Bay Path," "Titcomb's Letters" etc. New York: Charles Scribner, 124 Grand Street. pp. 220. 1859. UNEXPECTEDNESS is an essential element of wit,-perhaps, also, of pleasure; and it is the ill-fortune of professional reviewers, not only that surprise is necessarily something as rare with them as a June frost, but that loyalty to their extemporized omniscience should forbid them to acknowledge, even if they felt, so fallible an emotion. Unexpectedness is also one of the prime components of that singular product called Poetry; and, accordingly, the much-enduring man whose finger-ends have skimmed many volumes and many manners of verse may be pardoned the involuntary bull of not greatly expecting to stumble upon it in any such quarter. Shall we, then, be so untrue to our craft,-shall we, in short, be so unguardedly natural, as to confess that "Bitter-Sweet" has surprised us? It is truly an original poem,-as genuine a product of our soil as a golden-rod or an aster. It is as purely American, — nay, more than that,-as purely New-English,as the poems of Burns are Scotch. We read ourselves gradually back to our boyhood in it, and were aware of a flavor in it deliciously local and familiar, -a kind of sour-sweet, as in a frozen-thaw apple. From the title to the last line, it is delightfully characteristic. The family-party met for Thanksgiving can hit on no better way to be jolly than in a discussion of the Origin of Evil, and the Yankee husband (a shooting-star in the quiet heaven of village morals) about to run away from his wife can be content with no less cometlike vehicle than a balloon. The poem is Yankee, even to the questionable extent of substituting "locality" for "scene" in the stage-directions; and we feel sure that none of the characters ever went to bed in their lives, but always sidled through the more decorous subterfuge of "retiring." We could easily show that "BitterSweet" was not this and that and t'other, but, after all said and done, it would remain an obstinately charming little book. It is not free from faults of taste, nor from a certain commonplaceness of metre; but Mr. Holland always saves himself in some expression so simply poetical, some image so fresh and natural, the harvest of his own heart and eye, that we are ready to forgive him all faults, in our thankfulness at finding the soul of Theocritus transmigrated into the body of a Yankee. It would seem the simplest thing in the world to be able to help yourself to what lies all around you ready to your hand; but writers of verse commonly find it a difficult, if not impossible, thing to do. Conscious that a certain remoteness from ordinary life is essential in poetry, they aim at it by laying their scenes far away in time, and taking their images from far away in space, thus contriving to be foreign at once to their century and their country. Such self-made exiles and aliens are never repatriated by posterity. It is only here and there that a man is found, like Hawthorne, Judd, and Mr. Holland, who discovers or instinctively feels that this remoteness is attained, and attainable only, by lifting up and transfiguring the ordinary and familiar with the mirage of the ideal. We mean it as very high praise, when we say that "Bitter-Sweet" is one of the few books that have found the secret of drawing up and assimilating the juices of this New World of ours. The Mustee; or, Love and Liberty. By B. F. PRESBURY. Boston: Shepard, Clark, & Brown. 12mo. THE plot of this novel is open to criticism, and we might take exception to some of the opinions expressed in it; but it is evidently the work of a thoughtful and scholarly mind and benevolent heart,-is exceedingly well written, shows a great deal of power in the delineation both of ideal and humorous character, and includes some scenes of the most absorbing dramatic interest. .The character of Featherstone is admirably drawn, and Bill Frink is a positive addition to the literature of American low life. We commend him to our Southern friends, as an example of one of the most peculiar products of their peculiar institution. The author of the novel has lived at the South, and his descriptions of slavery display accurate observation, candid judgment, and a vivid power of pictorial representation. scenes in New Orleans are all good; and in few novels of the present day is there a finer instance of animated narration than the account of Flora's escape from slavery. The incidents are so managed that the reader is kept in breathless suspense to the end, with sympathies excited almost to pain, as one circumstance after another seems to threaten the capture of the beautiful fugitive. Though the book belongs to the class of anti-slavery novels, it is not confined to the subject of slavery, but in The cludes a consideration of almost all the "exciting topics of the day, and treats of them all with singular conscientiousness of spirit and vigor of thought. Rowse's Portrait of Emerson. Published in Photograph. Boston: Williams & Ev erett. Durand's Portrait of Bryant. Engraved by ALMOST One of the lost arts is that of portraiture. Raised by Titian and his contemporaries to the position of one of the noblest walks of Art, and in the generations following depressed to the position of minister to vanity and foolish pride, it has remained, during the most of the years since, one of the lowest and least reputable of the fields of artistic labor. The lost vein was broken into by Reynolds and Gainsborough, who left a golden glory in all they did for us; but no one came to inherit, and in England no one has since appeared worthy of comparison with them. In all Europe there is no school of portraiture worth notice; the so-called portrait-painters are only likeness-makers, comparing with the true portraitist as a topographical draughtsman does with a landscape artist. The intellectual elements of the artistic character, which successful portraiture insists on, are some of its very greatest,-if we admit, as it seems to us that we must, that imagination is not strictly intellectual, but an inspiration, an exaltation of the whole nature. paint a great man, one must not merely comprehend that he is great, but must in some sense rise up by the side of, and sympathize with, his greatness,―must enter into and identify himself with some essential quality of his character, which quality will be the theme of his portrait. So it inevitably follows that the greatness of the artist is the limitation of his art,that he expresses in his work himself as much as his subject, but no more of the latter than he can comprehend and appreciate. Το The distinction between the true and the false portraitist is that between expression of something felt and representation of something seen; and as the subtilest and noblest part of the human soul can only be felt, as the signs of it in the face can be recognized and translated only by sympathy, so no mere painter can ever succeed in expressing in its fulness the character of any great man. The lines in which holiest passion, subtilest thought, divinest activity have recorded in the face their existence and presence, are hieroglyphs unintelligible to one who has not kinIdled with that passion, been rapt in that thought, or swept away in sympathy with that activity; he may follow the lines, but must certainly miss their meaning. A successful portrait implies an equality, in some sense, between the artist and his original. The greatest of artists fail most completely in painting people with whom they have no sympathy, and only the mechanical painter succeeds alike with all,— the fair average of his works being a general levelling of his subjects; the great successes of the genuine artist being as surely offset (if one success can find offset in a thousand failures) by as absolute and extreme failure. As regards portraiture in general, the public may, without injury to Art or history, employ the painters who make the prettiest pictures of them; it doesn't matter to the future, if Mr. Jenkins, or even the Hon. Mr. Twaddle, has employed the promising Mr. Mahlstock to perpetuate him with a hundred transitory and borrowed graces, if the talented young littérateur, Mr. Simeah, has been found by his limner to resemble Lord Byron amazingly, and has in consequence consented to sit for a half-length, to be done à la Corsair, etc., etc.; but for our men of thought, for those whose works will stand to all time as the signals pointing out the road a nation followed, whose presence and acts shall be our intellectual history, -it is of some little moment that these should be given to us in such visible form, that men shall not conjecture, a thousand years hence, if Emerson were really a man, or a name under which some metaphysical club chose to publish their philosophics. In psychological history, portraits are as necessary as dates; and one of the most valuable gifts to an age is a great portraitpainter,—a Titian, a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, or a Page,—which last has more of the Titianesque character than any one who has painted since the great Venetians lived, and few, indeed, are the generations so endowed. Beside this full insight and representation of character, which makes the ideal portraiture, we have the less complete, but only in degree less valuable, apprehension which results from a point of sympathy, a likeness of liking in one or more fields of thought, a common sensitiveness, a common interest; and the rarer sympathy between artist and subject, of that intimacy and complete understanding of personal character, which, even where no great talent exists in the artist, gives a unique value to his work, but which, where the intimacy is that of great minds, gives us works on which no dilettanteism, even, makes a criticism,-as in that portrait of Dante by Giotto, to our mind the portrait par excellence of past time. In the three admirable portraits whose titles stand at the head of our notice, we have in one way and another all of the conditions we have spoken of fulfilled. Rowse's portrait of Emerson is one of the most masterly and subtile records of the character of a signal man, nay, the most masterly, we have ever seen. Those who know Emerson best will recognize him most fully in it. It represents him in his most characteristic mood, the subtile intelligence mingling with the kindly humor in his face, thoughtful, cordial, philosophic. The portrait is not more happy in the comprehension of character than in the rendering of it, and is as masterly technically as it is grandly characteristic. An eminent English poet, who knows Emerson well, says of it, justly,-"It is the best portrait I have ever seen of any man"; and we say of it, without any hesitation, that no living man, except, perhaps, William Page, is capable, at his best moment, of such a success. In Barry's portrait of Whittier it is easy to see the points of contact between the characters of the artist and the poetsubject, in the sensitiveness shown in the lines of the mouth in the drawing, in the delicacy of organization which has wasted the cheek and left the eye burning with undimmed brilliancy in the sunken socket, the fervent, earnest face, defying age to affect its expressiveness, as the heart it manifests defies the chill of time. It is an exceedingly interesting drawing, and one by which those who love the poet are willing to have him seen by the future. It must remain as the only and sufficient record of Whittier's personnel. In the portrait of Bryant we have the results of an intimacy of the most cordial kind, of years' duration,-an almost absolute unity of sentiment and similarity of habits of regarding the things most interesting to each. Of nearly the same age, Bryant and Durand have grown old together, loving the same Nature, and regard ing it with the same eyes, - the painter catching inspiration from the poet's themes, and the poet in turn getting new insight into the mystery of the outer world through the painter's eyes. Bryant's face has been a Sphinx's riddle to our best painters; none have succeeded in rendering its severe simplicity, and clear, self-disciplined expression, until Durand tried it with a success which renders the picture interesting evermore as a tribute of friendship as well as a solution of a difficult problem. The artist's hand was directed by a more than ordinary understanding of the lines it drew; it has not varied in a line from reverence for the verisimilitude the world had a right to insist on; it has not flattered or softened, but is simply, completely, absolutely, true. Bryant's face has an immovable tranquillity, a reserve and impassiveness, which yet are not coldness; the clear gray eye calmly looks through and through you, but permits no intelligence of what is passing behind it to come out to you. It is such a face as one of the old Greek kings might have had, as he sat administering justice. All this, it seems to us, Durand's picture gives. It looks out at you impassive, penetrating, as though it would hear all and tell nothing, -a strong, self-continent, completely balanced character,-unshrinking, unyielding, yet without being unsensitive, -concentrated, justly poised, and intense, without being passionate. The head is admirably engraved, though we do not at all fancy the way in which the background is done; it is heavy, formal, and unartistic, -but this may be matter of choice. |