Outraging nature is as common in art now as it was in the era of NED TESTY. Here you may see the picture of 'a lady in full length, gayly and archly tripping out in a hurricane by herself, in thin fluttering muslin, without cap, hat, or bonnet, by the side of a raging sea; where, if one may judge by the disposition of her limbs, and the archness of her countenance, she is practising an _allemande_ to the music of the thunder-claps which seem bursting over her in all directions; yet without the slightest mark of concern in her looks, or apparent apprehension of taking cold, after dancing under such discouraging circumstances of dress and weather; there stares a young miss strait out of the picture, with one hand grown to her side, and the other to the monstrous head of a Newfoundland dog, _sitting_ up exactly as high as she _stands_; and near by, in another frame, a parcel of Months or Hours, in petticoats, are smiling and dancing jigs round an emblem, in the shape of a good-looking woman in green, who is supposed to be Spring.' The critic wonders 'why they haven't got to changing the Minutes, Seconds, and other inferior parts of clock-work into little fluttering urchins.' But pause for a moment, reader, with hushed respiration, while we set before you a specimen of _the Awful_! There is an appropriate 'power of words' in the description of the 'grouping,' and doubtless the coloring was 'in keeping;' as much so, perhaps, as in DICKENS'S picture of the Wise Men of the East worshipping in a pink manger, or the Prodigal Son coming home in red rags to a purple father and a sea-green calf, waiting to be roasted: 'HERE is a piece equally stupendous in size and subject, bearing the semblance of having been furiously thrown upon the canvass in the dark, from the disordered pallets of all the painters in the Universe; a sort of maniac's vision, embodied into a rolling chaos, turbulently brewed up out of the warring rudiments of smoke! blood! fire! night! whirlwind! earth! and water; a ruinous huddle of every thing spiritual and material, real and conjectural, within and without the precincts of possible Nature; and of every mingling shape, shade, color, quality, and consistence; the whole congregated mass of discordances tumultuously wheeling, dashing, boiling, and thundering together, in one giddy storm of--NOTHING!' The figures of this landscape are entirely in keeping with it; 'ambiguous and reserved innuendos of beings, fluctuating somewhere among the shadowy and unsettled nomenclatures of incantation; demon, wizzard, griffin, goblin, demi-gorgon,' etc.