The Museum in which a large collection of Rubens and Vandyke’s pictures are deposited is an ugly suite of rooms in an obscure corner, the building having been a suppressed convent. It is situated in a little garden, ornamented, or rather disfigured by some wretched statues, as if their worthlessness was meant to serve as a foil to the gems within doors. It is curious that that which ought to be a native collection does not contain a single piece of Teniers, except one wretched thing which it is libellous to ascribe to his pencil, and only two of Snyders. In England, where the best pictures of Rubens’ pencil are comparatively unknown, and where our countrymen are accustomed only to his allegorical subjects and ungraceful women, the homage rendered to his abilities is, I think, rather an echo of his continental fame than a genuine appreciation of his merits; but any one who wishes thoroughly to estimate his loftier pretensions, and ardently to admit his claims to admiration, should visit the Museum and the Cathedral of Antwerp. Here his pictures evince not power alone, not merely that wonder-creative imagination that peoples the canvass with the most masterly compositions, but they exhibit a sweet adherence to nature, a rich perception of beauty, and a magical command of expression and action, that makes the canvass record the event it commemorates like a page of history or the voice of a poet. It is impossible, for instance, to look at “the Descent from the Cross” without almost expecting the attitudes to change as the act proceeded, so eager and intent are the countenances of his figures, and so earnest and real their occupations; and in the same way in the picture of “_the Crucifixion_,” where the Centurion has already broken one of the legs of the malefactor on the left, who has torn it from the cross under the agony of the stroke, and the soldier has the iron raised to crush the other; one’s very flesh thrills in anticipation of the scream that seems about to issue from the excruciated lips of the sufferer. This is a marvellous picture in every respect, and certainly the pride of the Museum; each individual figure is a perfect episode--Christ himself, in all the dignified calm repose of recent death; the soldier, with his hand raised to pierce his side, whilst Mary Magdalene, who seems in a paroxysm of suffering, to have been clinging around the foot of the cross, springs forward in a sudden agony of terror, with her arms outstretched to intercept the spear. This head of the Magdalene, Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounces to be “the most beautiful profile he ever saw of Rubens or any other painter.” Finely contrasted with the stirring action of these figures, is the expression of the mother of Jesus, who appears stupified by the exhaustion of her very sufferings, and that of the good Centurion, who leans forward over the neck of his horse in evident sympathy and horror at the scene before him.