“Titania and Bottom--Fairies attending,” was a happy specimen of Sir Edwin’s poetical invention, and one of the most agreeable pictures which illustrate Shakespeare. The graceful nature of the Queen of the Fairies was shown in Titania, whose figure expresses the love-languor of her absurd dream; she leans with a confiding caress against the most complacent Bottom, who extends his huge paw to handle a fairy. The head of Titania is decorated with a diadem of leaves and glow-worms. Fairies mounted on white rabbits add quaintness to the whole. “A Highlander in a Snow-storm, holding an Eagle he has just shot,” and “Lassie,” were summer and winter scenes which effectively contrast each other. These concluded the pictures of 1851. The year 1852 gave us nothing of immediate profit, but the year after made ample amends. What one may call the progress of ultra-facility, the decline of Sir Edwin’s power of solid painting, was illustrated by the pictures of 1853, being the dramatic designs--they were little more--styled “The Combat,” and, severally, “Night” and “Morning,” the subjects being a duel of stags, and the ruin of both. The pictures were at the Academy, and, later, at the International Exhibition of 1862. The contrasted effects were those of, 1, romantic gloom, much less than twilight, with a dim moon, with screens of rain flying by a tumultuous lake, and, 2, dawn growing rosier as the day grows over the fields; the subject of the death struggle, and of death. In the one picture the beasts were fighting, with such intensity of action as no one but Landseer could have given, so that they are “locked horn in horn in fight.” The second picture shows the combatants still locked together by their horns--indeed it was this which decided their fate; they are both dead on the hill-side, the day has come, the gusty night winds are hushed and the lake is a mirror again; growing light reveals the outlines of the hills, grey mist creeps on the strand, the bird of prey wheels in the air above the dead, and the fox has come from his lair in the rotting fern; the royal dead are carrion prey. Here is a moral forcibly depicted, on which we need not enlarge. The pictures belong to Viscount Hardinge, and have been engraved by Mr. T. Landseer, to whom not a little is due on their account, for it is certain that the magnificent design lost little in translation, and that the picture was not pre-eminent. “The Children of the Mist,” a group of deer on a cloud-laden moor, was exhibited with these more powerful examples which we have just described.