The first is Albano's infant Christ asleep on the cross. Does not that stainless, smiling face convince us that heavenly faith hath naught to fear from grief or death? The following one is Titian's Jesus bending under the weight of the cross. His mother on her knees before him--what a proof of reverence for the undeserved oppressions suffered by her Divine Son! What a look of resignation is his! yet what an air of pain, and therefore sympathy, with us! That is the best of all my pictures; to that I turn my eyes with rapture inexhaustible; and now come my dramatic _chefs-d'œuvre_, drawn from the works of four great poets. There is the meeting of Dido and Æneas in the Elysian fields; her indignant shade avoids him; rejoicing to be freed from the fond heart which yet would throb at his approach. The vaporous color of the phantoms and the pale scenes around them, contrast the air of life in Æneas, and the Sibyl who conducts him; but in these attempts the bard's description must far transcend all that the pencil reaches; in this, of the dying Clorinda, our tears are claimed by the remembered lines of Tasso, where she pardons the beloved Tancred, who has just dealt her the mortal wound. Painting inevitably sinks beneath poetry, when devoted to themes that great authors have already treated. One glance back at their words effaces all before us. Their favorite situations gain force from impassioned eloquence; while picturesque effect is most favored by moments of repose, worthy to be indefinitely prolonged, and too perfect for the eye ever to weary of their grace. Your terrific Shakspeare, my Lord, afforded the ensuing subject. The invincible Macbeth, about to fight Macduff, learns that the witches have equivocated with him; that Birnam wood is coming to Dunsinane, and that his adversary was _not_ of woman born, but 'untimely ripped' from his dying mother.[1] Macbeth is subdued by his fate, not by his foe; his desperate hand still grasps its glaive, certain that he must fall, yet to the last, opposing human strength against the might of demons. There is a world of fury and of troubled energy in that countenance--but how many of the poet's beauties do we lose! Can we paint Macbeth hurried into crime by the dreams of ambition, conjured up by the powers of sorcery? How express a terror compatible with intrepidity; how characterize the superstition that oppresses him? the ignoble credulity, which, even while he feels such scorn of life, forces on him such horror of death! Doubtless the human face is the grandest of all mysteries; yet fixed on canvas, it can hardly tell of more than one sensation; no struggle, no successive contrasts accessible to dramatic art, can painting give, as neither time nor motion exists for her.