It comprises, too, an admirable critique on the noble poem of the Lusiad, which in allusion to the great national catastrophe that so soon followed on its publication, and by which the ancient power, energy, and glory of Portugal were for ever destroyed, he calls "the swan-like cry of a people of heroes prior to its downfall." This essay and others of the same period furnish also a proof how very soon Frederick Schlegel had framed his critical views and opinions on the various works of art. His æsthetic system seems to have been formed at a single cast--we might almost say, that from the head of this intellectual Jove, the Pallas of criticism had leaped all armed. His metaphysical theories, on the contrary, appear to have been slowly elaborated--to have undergone many modifications and improvements in the lapse of years, and never to have been moulded into a form of perfect symmetry, until the last years of his life. During his abode in France, he addressed to a friend in Germany, a series of beautiful letters on the different schools and epochs of Christian painting. The pictorial treasures of a large part of Europe were then concentrated in the French capital; and Schlegel, availing himself of this golden opportunity, gave an account of the various master-pieces of modern art, contained in the public and private collections of Paris; interweaving in these notices, general views on the nature, object, and limits of Christian painting. These letters the author has since revised and enlarged; and they now form one of the most delightful volumes in the general collection of his works. The three arts, sculpture, music, and painting, correspond, according to the author, to the three parts of human consciousness, the body--the soul--and the mind. Sculpture, the most material of the fine arts, best represents the beauty of form, and the properties of sense: Music explores and gives utterance to the deepest feelings of the human soul: but it is reserved for the most spiritual of the arts--Painting, to express all the mysteries of intelligence--all the divine symbolism in nature and in man. He shows that the three arts have objects very distinct, and which must by no means be confounded. But the respective limits of these arts have not always been duly observed. Hence, confining his observation to painting, there are some artists, whom he calls sculpture-painters, like the great Angelo--others again musical painters, like Correggio and Murillo.