The writings of enthusiasts, however dry the subjects upon which they employ their pens, have always some power of fascination. Many a one who has never hooked a fish, has found delight in Isaac Walton. He is still the pleasant companion by river and brooklet, and the cause why, "He that has fishing loved should fish the more, And he should fish who never fish'd before." But then the subject is the loveliest of arts, Painting--embracing as it does the beautiful, the great, and the pathetic, whatever charms the eye and moves the heart--we are sensible of more than common pleasure, and become soothed into dreams and visions of our own, even by the gentle garrulity of a connoisseur. Is there any one who pretends to acquaintance with literature, however uninitiated he may be in the mysteries of the arts, who has not read the _Discourses_ of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and who has not wished, after reading them, to be enabled to say, "anche io son pittore?" When we are told of picture galleries with their thousand works of art, and are warmed by the descriptions, feeble though they must be, of many of them, we seem to be suddenly led by a lamp of more magical power than Aladdin's; for what was his gallery of fruit-trees bearing, precious stones, to a gallery rich in pictures, the still brighter fruits of genius, presenting endless variety, each one almost a world in itself, and all, enticing the imagination into regions unbounded, of charm and loveliness, suggested, though not made visible, but to the mind's eye? We remember in our school days giving Virgil credit for much tact in endeavouring to make a gentleman of AEneas, and succeeding too for a while in raising the more than equivocal character of his hero, by placing him in the picture-gallery of the Queen of Carthage, and giving him leisure to contemplate and to criticise, and poetically to describe to his silent and spiritless lounger-friend many noble and many touching works. In this passage we also obtain the great Latin poet's opinion of the ameliorating effect of "collections." The hero of the AEneid knew immediately he was among an amiable people. The picture-gallery was the "nova res oblata" which "timorem leniit"-- "Hic primum AEneas sperare salutem Ausus, et afflictis melius confidere rebus; Namque"----