colouring, the chief characteristic of the Venetian school, represents mankind in a still further onward (we use not the word advanced, because it may be misunderstood) state, in the state of more convention, of manners, and of luxury. Hence even most refined subjects of the Venetian are, with regard to purity, and moral and intellectual beauty, in a grade of inferiority to the Roman and Florentine. They are of the age of a civil government rather than of a religious influence. The countenances indicate the _business_ of the world; the more varied costume, the more rich covering of the figures, with less of the _nude_, are marks of merchandise and traffic. This is perceptible, and possibly somewhat to the disparagement of the full display of the subject, in the grand picture of Del Piombo, the _Raising of Lazarus_, though perhaps that picture, bearing such evidence of the design if not the hand of Michael Angelo, may by some not be admitted as belonging to the Venetian school. We mean not to say that the Venetian school did not advance the art by the new power of colour, the invention of that school; it opened the way to a new class of subjects, which still admitted much of the grand and the pathetic. It certainly did more; it showed that there was a grand and a pathetic in colour alone, a principle of art which, though first shown, and not in its perfect degree by the Venetians, has never yet been carried out as a principle. We hear much of its beauty, its harmony, in a limited sense of its power, but seldom of its sentiment.