The Duc de Leuchtenberg opens his small but beautiful gallery twice a week: Mondays and Thursdays. The doors are thrown open and every respectable person may walk in, without distinction or ceremony. It is a delightful morning lounge; there are not more than one hundred and fifty pictures--enough to excite and gratify, not satiate, admiration. The first room contains a collection of paintings by modern and living artists of France, Germany, and Italy. There is a lovely little picture by Madame de Freyberg of the Maries at the sepulchre of Christ; and by Heinrich Hess, a group of the three Christian graces--Faith, Hope, and Charity, seated under the German oak, and painted with great simplicity and sentiment; of his celebrated brother, Peter Hess, and Wagenbauer, and Jacob Dorner, and Quaglio, there are beautiful specimens. The French pictures did not please me: Girodet's picture of Ossian and the French heroes is a monstrous combination of all manner of affectations. I should not forget a fine portrait of Napoleon, by Appiani, crowned with laurel; and another picture, which represents him throned, with all the insignia of state and power, and supported on either side by Victory and Peace. For a moment we pause before that proud form, to think of all he was, all he might have been--to draw a moral from the fate of selfishness. He rose by blood, he built on man's distress, And th'inheritance of desolation left To great expecting hopes.[16] Among the pictures of the old masters there are many fine ones, and three or four of peculiar interest. There is the famous head by Bronzino, generally entitled, Petrarch's Laura, but assuredly without the slightest pretensions to authenticity. The face is that of a prim, starched _précieuse_, to which the peculiar style of this old portrait painter, with his literal nature, his hardness, and leaden colouring, imparts additional coldness and rigidity. But the finest picture in the gallery--perhaps one of the finest in the world--is the Madonna and Child of Murillo: one of those rare productions of mind which baffle the copyist, and defy the engraver,--which it is worth making a pilgrimage but to gaze on. How true it is that "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever!" When I look at Murillo's roguish, ragged beggar-boys in the royal gallery, and then at the Leuchtenberg gallery turn to contemplate his Madonna and his ascending angel, both of such unearthly and inspired beauty, a feeling of the wondrous grasp and versatility of the man's mind almost makes me giddy. The lithographic press of Munich is celebrated all over Europe. Aloys Senefelder, the inventor of the art, has the direction of the works, with a well-merited pension, and the title of Inspector of Lithography.[17] * * * * *