If, for lack of space, we elect to pass by certain preliminary reflections which the _Monthly Review_ rather unkindly dismisses as a "tedious jumble," M. Rouquet's first subject is History Painting, a branch of the art which, under George the Second, attained to no great excellence. For this M. Rouquet gives three main reasons, the first being that afterwards advanced by Hogarth and Reynolds, namely,--the practical exclusion, in Protestant countries, of pictures from churches. A second cause was the restriction of chamber decorations to portraits and engravings; and a third, the craze of the connoisseur for Hogarth's hated "Black Masters," the productions of defunct foreigners. And this naturally brings about the following digression, quite in Hogarth's own way, against that contemporary charlatan, the picture-dealer:--"English painters have an obstacle to overcome, which equally impedes the progress of their talents and of their fortune. They have to contend with a class of men whose business it is to sell pictures; and as, for these persons, traffic in the works of living, and above all of native artists, would be impossible, they make a point of decrying them, and, as far as they can, of confirming amateurs with whom they have to deal in the ridiculous idea that the older a picture is the more valuable it becomes. See, say they (speaking of some modern effort), it still shines with that ignoble freshness which is to be found in nature; Time will have to indue it with his learned smoke--with that sacred cloud which must some day hide it from the profane eyes of the vulgar in order to reveal to the initiated alone the mysterious beauties of a venerable antiquity."