AQUILIUS.—This was a descent from the non-natural pastoral of the by-gone age, to the low natural, from which art derived but little benefit. Goldsmith very aptly and wittily satirised the transition state in the Primrose family-group, in which each individual adopted a singular independence. Venus, Cupids, an Amazon, and Alexander the Great, with Dr Primrose, holding his books on the Whistonian controversy. CURATE.—One would rather imagine that Goldsmith was severe upon the practice of an earlier date. There are several pictures at Hampton Court, and one large one, if I remember, on the stair-wall, in which the statesmen of the day represent the deities of the heathen mythology. LYDIA.—Yes, and I remember a very ridiculous smaller picture, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth—but it affects the historical. The queen and her train enter on one side of the piece, and on the other Juno, Venus, and Minerva. The goddesses are in every respect outdone, and start with astonishment,—Juno at the superior power, Minerva, the superior wisdom, and Venus the superior beauty of the queen. There must be something very curious in the nature of taste: seeing such pictures, one cannot but reflect, that though they are now perfectly ridiculous, they could not have been so when they were painted. They were men of understanding who sat for their portraits in these whimsical characters; and the queen—it is surprising!—there is surely something involved in it, that history does not touch. GRATIAN.—It is the more surprising, as Holbein had painted, and his works were before their eyes. AQUILIUS.—It would be not undeserving curiosity to sift the history of allegory—what is the cause that it was then so generally accepted in Europe; infected the poetry and painting of every civilised country. The new aspect of religion had much to do with it: images, pictures, particularly the earlier, representing the Deity, and the Virgin, had become objects of hatred—of persecution. And thus the arts made their escape into the regions of allegory. CURATE.—Chilling regions, in which even genius with all his natural glow was frost-bitten. An escape from what was believed to what could not be believed. It was the cold fit of the ague of superstition. GRATIAN.—The devotion of the early painters produced, what nothing but devotion could produce; theirs was a true devotion, notwithstanding the superstition contained in it. The iconoclast spirit has scarcely been yet laid. As we rise from the prostrate position of our fears, the more readily shall we acknowledge the spirituality of the early painters. They are daily approximating a more just estimation. But we are wandering; we were speaking of landscape: surely, it is difficult to find a subject that shall be altogether unpleasing. I do not remember ever to have seen an outdoor scene, unless it might have been in a town, that did not please with some beauty or other.