It is said to be in her Majesty’s possession. There is in Lucian a description of a picture of a Centaur and his family, a magnificent group: the father centaur is holding up a lion’s skin to the gaze of his young progeny, to excite them to deeds of courage. If this poor agonised death-writhing otter is to be perpetually before the eyes of our young princes, they will not learn much good from the lesson. For my own part, I look upon the picture with entire disgust, and would on no account have it before my eyes. I know not in what mood I could be to endure it. LYDIA.—I think we really may dispense with the hanging up this picture anywhere. I cannot bear to look at it. It is a picture to teach cruelty. As a test of its impropriety, imagine it placed as an ornament in our Sunday school: we should have the children brought up savages. CURATE.—Thanks, dearest Lydia. I well knew this picture would not be to your taste; we will, at all events, set it aside. Happy are we, that our women of England can be mothers of heroes, without being inured to the cruelty of bull-fights. A Spanish lady, describing an exhibition of the kind, remarked how glorious was the sight, for there were thirteen horses and one man killed. I suspect Aquilius will not quite approve of the “Deer-Stalking” lately exhibited at the Academy. AQUILIUS.—Certainly not; and for the same reason. It puts man in a degrading position; and our sympathy is for the poor creatures who fly terrified, not seeing their skulking enemies; and one poor creature is knocked over in his wild flight. It is admirably painted; the scene all we could wish; but the story is bad—the moral bad. You look at the picture without feeling a common desire with the hunters: you wish them away. You have their object put before you basely: their attitudes are mean. It is not a work, great as it is in art, that ought to give pleasure. GRATIAN.—And yet you are not displeased reading Mr Scrope’s “Deer-Stalking?” It is only putting his words on canvass. CURATE.—True; but are they faithfully put? and even so, words and paint are not the same; their power is different. The description of language passes on; you are not allowed to dwell too long on what, if seen embodied, would but shock you, by its being arrested, and made permanent. I remember the description. You at first scarcely know if there is a deer or not; it is only the experienced eye can discover the motion of the ear, or some speck of the creature, at a distance. You enter into the breathless caution of the hunter—his steady and earnest hope; but you see not, or only for a moment, the skulking attitude. The poet—for the prose is poetry—touches with a light and delicate hand that which the less discriminating painter grasps, holds firm, and fixes as his subject. AQUILIUS.—A just remark. The sentiment is thus made both cruel and mean.