The choice of these subjects, constitutes the difference between the Dutch and the Italian schools of art. The former painted pastoral scenery with a fidelity incomparably superior to the Italians, yet greatly inferior in the higher excellencies of art. They are justly admired for their attention to detail, to exact finish, and all the results of "mere mechanic pains," but are void of classical taste, of moral instruction, and the poetry of the imagination, that highest effort of genius. Their works may therefore be beautiful, but never sublime, and their attempts at historic painting degrade it to something worse than caricature. I remember to have seen in the Louvre, a little painting of this school, designed for "Peter denying his Lord in Pilate's house." The interior was a _Holland kitchen_; boors _were smoking_ before a _chimney_ place, or _playing at cards_ on a tub reversed; a coarse looking woman held Peter by his collar, and chanticleer sat perched on a beam of the house. The costume and furniture were equally out of keeping, but executed with the most harmonious tone and finest touch of the pencil. Now the same subject in the schools of Italy would represent a hall becoming the governor of Judea, soldiers in Roman costume would be grouped around an antique vase of embers, placed upon a tripod, and Peter would quail under the pert recognition of a beautiful damsel; the grey dawn would appear through the intercolumniations of the portico, and the warning clarion of the cock would be expressed on the brow of the conscience-stricken Apostle.