The Venetian school revelled in the luxury of colors and feasted the eye with the most harmonious arrangement of the brightest tints and broadest light and shade; and some have supposed could these have been added to the Roman school, it would have been the perfection of art, but Sir Joshua Reynolds thought them incompatible, and it is not without probability that a gayer dress would have detracted from the simplicity and greatness of the Roman paintings, as would pearls in the ears of a fine statue. If the Venetians therefore, were not so sublime, they were more beautiful: "To those of Venice. She the magic art Of colors melting into colors gave. Theirs too it was by one embracing mass Of light and shade, that settles round the whole, Or varies, tremulous, from part to part, O'er all a binding harmony to throw, To raise the picture and repose the sight." Of these, Titian stands pre-eminent in the truth of nature and the choice of the beautiful; a refinement is impressed on every product of his pencil, and from the portrait of Charles the 5th to the assumption of the Madonna at Venice, (his greatest work) there is a nobleness of air, an elevation of thought above common men or common things; it was this, not less than the truth of his coloring, that employed his pencil upon so many crowned and noble heads; his carnations glowed with the freshness of life, neither erring with too much of the blossom of the rose or the yellow of the marigold, and it is probable from his works, Fresnoy drew that admirable precept: "He that would color well, must color bright, Hope not that praise to gain by sickly white." Correggio comes next in the scale of excellence, who with less truth of color than the Venetians, or greatness of design than the Romans, surpassed them all in _grace_, that indescribable "_je ne sais quoi_," so delightful in the movements of some persons, and equally opposed to the rules of polished society and clownish rusticity. His figures repose with a nature unstudied, and his children play with an infant's artless innocence--though frequently homely in feature and badly drawn, they irresistibly charm the learned and the simple, and command at once the highest admiration and the highest price.[1] His finest work is probably the St. Jerome at Parma, so called from this saint's forming one figure in the group, with the infant Saviour, his mother, and Mary Magdalene. The anachronism of thus introducing persons who lived at different eras, did not affect the minds of good Catholics three centuries since, more than the same discrepancy does the modern reader of Anacharsis. [Footnote 1: A Holy Family, only 9½ by 13 inches in the national gallery in England, was purchased for 3000 guineas.] G. C. For the Southern Literary Messenger. RECENT AMERICAN NOVELS.