Seen from a distance, the latter’s ‘Deluge’ has a certain awe-inspiring air with it. A slimy green man stands on a green rock, and clutches hold of a tree. On the green man’s shoulders is his old father, in a green old age; to him hangs his wife, with a babe on her breast, and, dangling at her hair, another child. In the water floats a corpse (a beautiful head); and a green sea and atmosphere envelops all this dismal group. The old father is represented with a bag of money in his hand; and the tree, which the man catches, is cracking, and just on the point of giving way. These two points were considered very fine by the critics; they are two such ghastly epigrams as continually disfigure French tragedy. For this reason I have never been able to read Racine with pleasure,--the dialogue is so crammed with these lugubrious good things--melancholy antitheses--sparkling undertakers’ wit; but this is heresy, and had better be spoken discreetly. The gallery contains a vast number of Poussin’s pictures; they put me in mind of the colour of objects in dreams,--a strange, hazy, lurid hue. How noble are some of his landscapes! What a depth of solemn shadow is in yonder wood, near which, by the side of a black water, halts Diogenes! The air is thunder-laden and breathes heavily. You hear ominous whispers in the vast forest gloom. Near it is a landscape, by Carol Dujardin, I believe, conceived in quite a different mood, but exquisitely poetical too. A horseman is riding up a hill, and giving money to a blowsy beggar-wench. _O matutini rores auræque salubres_! in what a wonderful way has the artist managed to create you out of a few bladders of paint and pots of varnish! You can see the matutinal dews twinkling in the grass, and feel the fresh salubrious airs (‘the breath of Nature blowing free,’ as the Corn-law man sings) blowing free over the heath; silvery vapours are rising up from the blue lowlands. You can tell the hour of the morning and the time of the year: you can do anything but describe it in words. As with regard to the Poussin above mentioned, one can never pass it without bearing away a certain pleasing dreamy feeling of awe and musing; the other landscape inspires the spectator infallibly with the most delightful briskness and cheerfulness of spirit. Herein, lies the vast privilege of the landscape painter: he does not address you with one fixed particular subject of expression, but with a thousand never contemplated by himself, and which only arise out of occasion. You may always be looking at a natural landscape as at a fine pictorial imitation of one; it seems eternally producing new thoughts in your bosom, as it does fresh beauties from its own. I cannot fancy more delightful, cheerful, silent companions for a man than half a dozen landscapes hung round his study. Portraits, on the contrary, and large pieces of figures have a painful, fixed, staring look, which must jar upon the mind in many of its moods.