AQUILIUS.—Wilkie was a man of great observation, great good sense, manifest proof of which his correspondence sets forth; but that necessary virtue of a painter of familiar life, which he possessed in so great a degree, observation, led him oftener to look for character than beauty. Oddity would strike him before regularity. Nor was he a cheerful painter. His “Blind Man’s Buff,” is contrived to be without hilarity, and it is singularly unfortunate in the sharp angles of hips and elbows. His best picture of this kind is certainly the “Chelsea Pensioners”—or “Battle of Waterloo,” very finely painted; but there is an acting joy in it,—it is joy staid in its motion, and bid sit for its portrait. So his “Village Wake” in our national gallery, is not joyous as a whole; the figures are spots, and the mass of the picture is dingy. Pictures, like poems, should not only be fair but touching, “dulcia sunto,” and this is more imperatively essential to domestic scenes. The story should always be worth telling. Painters seem to have taken it into their heads that any thing, which presents a good means for exhibiting light and shade and colour, makes a picture. If an incident or a scene be not worth _seeing_, it is not worth painting. GRATIAN.—That is never more true than when they are figure pieces. Our likings and our antipathies are stronger in all representations of the ways and manners of men, than in all the varieties of other nature. We can bear a low and mean landscape, but degraded humanity seldom is, and never ought to be pleasing. CURATE.—Aristotle determines that brutishness is worse than vice. Vice is a part of our nature, but brutishness unhumanises the whole nature. It is certainly astonishing that painters can take a delight, not having a moral end in the performances, to select the low scenes—the utter degradation of civilisation, and therefore worse than any savage state—as subjects for pictures. How is it that in a drawing-room a connoisseur will look with complacency—more than complacency—upon a painted representation of beastly boors drinking, whose presence, and the whole odour of which scene, in the reality, he would rush from with entire disgust?