There were preparations for a festival in the halls of the “Royal Academy” of London. A distinguished foreign member of the profession was expected to be present, and the first individual not a native on whom the fellowship of the Academy had hitherto been conferred. The king and royal family had promised the honor of their attendance, and the prize medals of the exhibition were to be presented, of which the eminent foreign artist alluded to had carried off the first. The saloons were gorgeously lighted. All the pictures of the exhibition had been removed from the walls, except those few favored masterpieces obtaining the award of the prizes—and one surpassing work of art that hung by itself at the head of the principal saloon, with a delicate wreath of laurel suspended above it, betokening it the first in honor as in place. It consisted of two figures, of which the most conspicuous was that of a shrinking, prostrate female, expressing the highest ideal of loveliness and grace, joined to utter abandonment, contrition and shame; appearing as if the whole soul had imbued itself through every muscle and lineament of the frame, for the delineation of these emotions, that none could mistake that model of penitential sorrow, afterward so celebrated as “The Weeping Magdalene.” The face was completely buried in her hands, but so far from the absence of this most essential tablet of female beauty being felt as a defect, it was rather an adjunct to the effect, inasmuch as it left to the imagination’s heightening conception the modeling of a countenance meet for such a form, and such magic tones of color—burning with blushes—we know it from the roseate tint that almost seemed reflected from it along the pearly edges of the enshrouding hands—and drowned in tears, that fell like liquid diamonds over the snow of the Redeemer’s feet. The accompanying figure was somewhat inferior, yet it expressed that union of majesty and sweetness joined to godlike compassion, in as great a degree as human art has ever been able to embody in its ideas of the Divine man. On the side of the hall opposite the picture was erected a pavilion, emblazoned with the royal arms of England, and surmounted by a crown, under which George the Third had just seated himself, habited in his usual dress of a marshal’s uniform, with the rather vulgar, squat figure of his queen, the German Charlotte, surrounded by their _suite_, who gazed, with curious though certainly not very connoisseur like eyes, occasionally through their opera glasses at the divine picture suspended in front of them on the opposite wall.