GRATIAN.—There is an anecdote told of Fuseli, that when on a visit to some friend at Birmingham, a lady in a party said to him—“Oh, Mr Fuseli, you should have been here last week, there was such a subject for your pencil, a man was taken up for eating a live cat.”—“Madam,” said the veritable Fuseli, “I paint terrors, not horrors.” For my own part, life has so many terrors, and horrors too, that I should prefer mitigating their effect, by having more constantly before me the agreeabilities—pleasant domestic scenes, soft landscapes, or such gay scenes and figures as my favourite Teniers occasionally painted, or the sunny De Hooge; or why not bring forward some of our pleasant home-scene English painters? Did you not see, and quite love, that little delight of a picture, the hay-making scene in the Vicar of Wakefield, by our own, and who will be the wide world’s own, Mulready? Such scenes ravish me. Did you not long to walk quietly round and look in the vicar’s face, as he and Mrs Primrose sat apart with their backs to you? Mulready, you see, had the sense to leave something to the imagination. AQUILIUS.—Yes, pictures of this kind have a very great charm: they are for us in our domestic mood, and that is our general mood—they should gently move our love and pity. But I cannot conceive a greater mistake than to make “familiar life” as it is called, doleful, uncheerful subjects, that are out of the rule of love and pity, very easily run into the class of terror; there is scarcely a between, and if one—it is insipidity. GRATIAN.—Now, I shall probably commit an offence against general taste if I confess that, in my eyes, Wilkie is very apt to paint insipid subjects. He seems too often to have been led to a matter of fact, because it had some accessories that would paint rather well, than because the fact was worth telling, either for its moral or its amusement. Some of his pieces, notwithstanding their excellent painting and perfectly graphic power, rather displease me. I never could take any interest in his celebrated “Blind Fiddler.” It may be nature, but there is nothing to touch the feelings in it: had I been present, I should not have given the man a sixpence. And as for the hideous grimace-making boy, I could have laid the stick with pleasure on his back. I don’t think I could ever have kissed the ugly child.