their proper degree of finish, were felt by Tiziano, before and after his emancipation from the shackles of Giov. Bellino, every work of his during the course of nearly a centenary practice proves: to select two from all, the Martyrdom of the Dominican Peter, that summary of his accumulated powers, and the Presentation of the Virgin, one of his first historic essays, owe, if not all, their greatest effect, to scenery: loftiness and solitude of site assist the sublimity of the descending vision to consecrate the actors beyond what their characters and style of limbs could claim, and render the first an object of submissive admiration, whilst its simple grandeur renders the second one of cheerful and indulgent acquiescence; and reconciles us to a detail of portrait-painting, and the impropriety of associating domestic and vulgar imagery with a consecrated subject. It is for these reasons that the importance of scenery and back-ground has been so much insisted on by Reynolds; who frequently declared, that whatever preparatory assistance he might admit in the draperies or other parts of his figures, he always made it a point to keep the arrangement of the scenery, the disposition and ultimate finish of the back-ground to himself. By the choice and scenery of the back-ground we are frequently enabled to judge how far a painter entered into his subject, whether he understood its nature, to what class it belonged, what impression it was capable of making, what passion it was calculated to rouse: the sedate, the solemn, the severe, the awful, the terrible, the sublime, the placid, the solitary, the pleasing, the gay, are stamped by it. Sometimes it ought to be negative, entirely subordinate, receding or shrinking into itself; sometimes more positive, it acts, invigorates, assists the subject, and claims attention; sometimes its forms, sometimes its colour ought to command.--A subject in itself bordering on the usual or common, may become sublime or pathetic by the back-ground alone, and a sublime or pathetic one may become trivial and uninteresting by it: a female leaning her head on her hand on a rock might easily suggest itself to any painter of portrait, but the means of making this figure interesting to those who are not concerned in the likeness, were not to be picked from the mixtures of the palette: Reynolds found the secret in contrasting the tranquillity and repose of the person by a tempestuous sea and a stormy shore in the distance; and in another female contemplating a tremulous sea by a placid moonlight, he connected elegance with sympathy and desire.