flower pieces are things that few people care much to look at--and, for our part, we confess that we seldom afford them more than a very cursory glance; but our attention was seriously and pleasingly arrested by both of those exhibited this year by Mr Groenland, remarkable, as they are, not only for the accuracy with which he imitates the texture of the different fruits--whether pulpiness, bloom, or transparency be their chief characteristic--and for the admirable delicacy of his flower-painting, but also for his skill in elevating and giving interest to the walk of art he has chosen. This is strikingly the case in No. 1254, apropos of which we have another piece of injustice or carelessness--let them call it which they like--to notice on the part of the Hanging Committee. Of all the seven rooms of the Academy, not one is so little visited as that which, in the catalogue, is headed Architecture. Accordingly, the hangmen have placed at one end of it five as pleasing pictures--each in its own style--as any in the Exhibition. Here we have the _Vierge Route du Simplon_, a charming airy landscape by Harding; _Esther_, by O'Neil, one of the best, perhaps, he ever did; _The Port of Marseilles_, by E. W. Cooke, very like and very well painted, with excellent water; _A Winter Evening_, by H. Horsley, a most clever piece of snow scenery, with a cold look that makes one shiver, and a capital effect of setting sun through an archway; and, last in our enumeration, but not in merit, Mr Groenland's second fruit and flower piece, with a landscape background, a gorgeous and life-like peacock, a flush of rhododendrons, and painstaking and talent in every leaf and flower. Another picture in the same vicinity, by W. Fisher, _The Coulin_, a subject taken from Moore's melodies, is rather affected, but by no means destitute of merit. Mr Martin's picture, _The Last Man_, is far from one of his best. The subject is unpleasing, and there is a decided fault of perspective; the human corpses and carcasses of strange beasts, in the foreground, being much too small in proportion with the figure of the man, who stands on an elevation which is doubtless intended to be much in advance of, but which in reality is almost on a line with, the spot where they are spread pellmell in grisly confusion. Mr Hannah's _Lady Northumberland and Lady Percy dissuading the Earl from joining the wars against Henry IV._ is oddly coloured, and acquires a cold, insipid look from the profusion of blue and gray; but it is a good and clever picture. A similar class of subject has been selected by Mr T. J. Barker, from Professor Aytoun's ballad of _Edinburgh after Flodden_. Randolph Murray, bearing news of the defeat, is the centre of a throng anxious even to agony. "Why art thou alone, unfollowed? Is it weal, or is it woe?"