GRATIAN.—“_O si sic omnia!_” I love all field sports, and river sports too; but it is when horse, dog, and man all agree in the pleasure, and the bit of cruelty—for such, I suppose, we must admit it to be—is kept out of sight as much as possible, that we are willing to adopt the Benthamite principle into the sporting code, “the greatest happiness to the greatest number.” Yet I don’t like to refine away feeling in this way, and say, many enjoy, and one poor creature is hunted. I rather put it all upon nature. There is an instinct to hunt and be hunted, and perhaps there is a reciprocal pleasure. I like our good old sporting songs; they dwell upon the health and enjoyment of refreshing animation, the sociality, the good humour (and sometimes with a nice touch of pity too) of sport; they take no pleasure in dwelling upon the hard, the cruel necessity. AQUILIUS.—Then are our ballad-makers more tender-hearted than our painters! GRATIAN.—And there is need they should be; for some of our painters, and not only ours, but of all countries, have, to my mind, too much indulged in representations of cruelty. I have often wondered how many of the old pictures, your martyrdoms of saints, came to be painted. Who could take pleasure in looking at them? CURATE.—The best were works of high genius, and were painted for religious places; and though cruelty is necessary to the story of martyrdom, it is seldom made the subject—it is the triumph, the angelic choir, and the crown, and the sublime faith,—all combine to make the sublime subject; the mere act then becomes but the accessory; and such pictures, seen in their proper places—the chapels for which they were painted, and with the mind under a religious impression—are of the noblest interest, of most improving contemplation. I have heard such pictures condemned, because they have been seen in uncongenial places, and under antagonistic impressions. They are not for banquet-rooms, nor ball-rooms; nor to be commingled with the low-life subjects of the Dutch school, nor amidst the _omnium-gatherum_ of galleries. The art cannot offer a higher pleasure than the contemplation of these sublime productions of Italian genius, seen when and where they should be exhibited, and alone. I have seen some that make their own sanctity, which seems to spread from them in a divine light, and diffuse itself into the outer obscure, in which all that is unfitting and minute is buried; and the great work of mind has created its own architecture, and filled it with the religious awe under which we gaze and wonder. And are we not the better?