in their minds the advices and injunctions addressed to them by a senior, and often an aged brother, on that occasion; and very frequently, the press is resorted to, in order to secure the possession of such a memorial of vows, and a stimulant to fidelity, for the retrospects of future life. This work of Mr. Burder's will be a desirable accompaniment to any printed Charge, and will supply, with great advantage, the absence of that monition where it has not been preserved. His plan consists of laying down Thirty Maxims, or Rules of prime importance, on each of which he dilates with a comprehensive and germinant brevity.

These disquisitions, or what more properly may be denominated addresses to the understanding and the best feelings, are enriched with many impressive citations from Baxter, Cecil, Booth, Chalmers, and others. If we insert a few of these Maxims, they may serve to convey an idea of the character and tendency of the whole.

I. Reflect much on the indispensable and transcendent importance of Personal Religion. III. Repress to the utmost the feelings of Vanity and Pride, and the undue desire of Popular Applause. VIII. Let pointed Appeals to the heart, and direct Applications to the conscience, form a prominent feature of your discourses. IX. Do not aim at a degree of Originality to which you are not equal, or of which the subject under consideration does not admit. XVI. Endeavour to regulate, on principles which an enlightened conscience will approve, the time devoted to Pastoral Visits and Friendly Intercourse. XX. Guard against every approach to a Sectarian and Party Spirit; and cherish the feeling of Christian Love to all who embrace the faith and "adorn the doctrine" of the Gospel. XXIX. Observe Punctuality in all your engagements. XXX. Do not hastily abandon a Station of Usefulness, in which you have acquired a moral influence.'

As a specimen of the amplifications, we select some parts of the XVIIIth section.

Cultivate and display Christian Zeal for the general interests of true religion, both at home and abroad. With all the feelings of PASTORAL Solicitude, never let the Christian minister circumscribe his desires or his exertions, by the limits of his own peculiar sphere. -Let him sedulously endeavour to excite and to maintain, in full vigour, the same spirit of benevolent activity among the people of his charge. By stimulating them to unite in doing good, he will direct them to the most effectual means of gaining good. He will most assuredly promote their own prosperity, by animating their zeal and liberality in aid of the cause of bibles, and the cause of missions, and the cause of schools, and the cause of tracts, and all the methods of doing good, on a larger or a smaller scale, which fall within the

limits of their means and opportunities.-In the midst, however, of all his public engagements, let not the young minister venture to extend, without due consideration and needful restriction, his pledges of personal attendance on the meetings of benevolent and religious societies. A senior minister, whose mind is enriched with ample resources which habit has progressively facilitated, may, with impunity, make a sacrifice of hours and days, which a junior minister would make at the hazard of his peace, of his health, and of his usefulness. TIME, and time in large and unbroken portions, he must secure for the acquirement and communication of scriptural knowledge, unless he would abandon at once the hope and the effort of making progress in the lofty and difficult attainments of pulpit excellence. "The habit I recommend," said Dr. Paley, in his Charge to the younger Clergy," as the foundation of almost all the good ones, is retirement. Learn to live alone." On the well-proportioned union of retired and diligent study with social intercourse and public engagements, depends, in no small degree, the efficiency, as well as the happiness of the pastor's life.'

Art. VII. Essai sur l'Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, depuis les Temps les plus anciens, jusqu'à nos Jours. Par M. le Compte Grégoire Orloff, Sénateur de l'Empire de Russie. 2 Tomes.

Paris. 1824.

THE

HE origin of the fine arts is a subject that will be always obscure. The chasm is supplied by fable,-a plain demonstration that the genuine tradition is lost. It is fortunately a question as useless as it is dark. It might satisfy an unprofit able curiosity, to be enabled to trace them tottering as it were through their weak and imperfect infancy. The means, however, by which they may be carried to their highest perfection, the causes which assist or impede their progress, the principles of beauty upon which they are to be examined,—these are the chief, and perhaps the only objects, that ought to occupy their historian.

Count Orloff has thrown away, we think, much superfluous diligence upon this unimportant question, as it regards the art of Painting. It is impossible to ascertain how or when it was produced. There can be little doubt, however, that Poetry was the eldest born. It is the earliest language of the soul-its first endeavour to give utterance to its innate love and perception of beauty, Thus, the Jewish scriptures, Homer,-in short, every record of the primeval world, attests her priority. It is not irrational to conceive, that Painting, like the sister art, was, from her first beginnings, as she evidently is in her more advanced state, an expression of the same internal sense inherent in our nature. Hence," it would be unphilosophical to infer, that its infancy was long,

or that its first attempts were deformities. The admiration of the human form and of the enchanting scenes of external nature, which gave rise to the two corresponding kinds of imitation, would not have suffered even the first artist who held the pencil, to be content with a false and imperfect copy. In this respect, it may be said to have had no infancy. Nor is the miraculous bound made by that art in every country where it has been successfully cultivated, to be accounted for by any other reasoning. We speak only of those countries, for there are nations in which it will always remain in a weak, protracted, unprogressive infancy. An unlimited series of ages, perhaps, would not permit the proverbial diligence of the Chinese to acquire the slightest skill in painting-we mean not in the mechanical, but in the ideal branch of the art. On the other hand, it arose in Greece and in modern Italy almost spontaneously, and grew there with the quickest luxuriance.

What the art owes to the forcing process of patronage, is another question which has employed much useless discussion; and those who take directly opposite sides of the controversy, are nearer the truth than they mutually imagine of each other. Greece swarmed with artists long before the time of Pericles, and Florence had her school before the munificent period of the Medicis. It is a favourite hypothesis also of some writers, among whom is Winkellman, that there is an inseparable connexion between civil liberty and the cultivation of the arts. Others have contended, and with greater speciousness, that they advance more rapidly under the protecting beams of royal patronage. There is truth in both these systems, but in neither exclusively. To assert that the arts will thrive most under a despotism would be false: it is equally untrue, that they can flourish only under a free government. Truth seldom resides in extremes. If there were a necessary connexion between painting and political freedom, New York and Washington ought to produce her Michael Angelos and Raffaelles: if the perfection of art followed that of civil institution, Great Britain must have had long ago, that which she has never had hitherto, her school of artists. Nor was the great era of painting in either Greece or Italy, precisely that of political freedom. It was under the sway of Pericles, who for forty years was virtually at the head of Athens, and during fifteen its sole tyrant, that Phidias formed his great and sublime style, of which the few fragments that have survived the wreck of time, are the wonder, the delight, the despair of succeeding artists; and Parrhasius during the same period painted those great works which, though lost to modern times, still live in the eloquent praises of antiquity. In Italy, the most auspicious peVOL. XXI. N.S. 2 L

riod of the arts was under a similar government. The Medici did not restore the republic of Florence: their power was a dictatorship, which suspended the free forms of the constitution. Leonardo da Vinci, Fra. Bartolomeo, Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle were reserved for that tranquil sovereignty. At the death of Lorenzo, the arts migrated to the quiet asylum of the Vatican. The brightest eras at Athens, ancient Rome, and Florence, were those of Pericles, Augustus, and Lorenzo. The truth is, they will flourish, wherever they are protected, whereever the love of luxury exists, and the means of acquiring it are abundant.

Are there not, however, other moral causes that influence their growth? Is there not a perceptible pathology in nations, according to which their genius or their aptitude towards particular arts, holds a manifest sympathy with the objects of ex-ternal perception? Nature lavished with the fondest prodigality every charm of clime and scene upon Greece. Her delicious landscape respired with those enchanting beauties. which Sophocles has so exquisitely painted in his dipus. Above all, the human person in that country was endued alike with the nobler attributes and more delicate symmetries of form. The Greeks could not, therefore, but catch from the loveliness and grandeur of the visible creation, that quick sensibility to the fair and the sublime, so characteristic of their nation, and people the world of imagination from the images of outward beauty which were extended before them. Perhaps, the same observations would apply in part to Italy, in whose soil the arts would probably have sprung up during the more ancient periods of her glory, but for the counteractions of the military pride and republican austerity of the Romans, who railed against them with Cato, and decried them as the badges of servitude.

It is to be lamented, that we have no satisfactory records of the state of Painting in early Greece. Count Orloff, treading the beaten track, is quite content with the authority of Pliny for his catalogue. In truth, it is the best that we have; but to repose with complete acquiescence in his dates and his chronological series, would lead us into innumerable errors, and instil into us the unfounded conception that we had a correcter list of Grecian painters and their works, than we are entitled to boast of. To be sure, Count Orloff's chapters go off glibly. He displays no solicitude concerning the epochs when the Grecian painters severally flourished, but implicitly adopts the nomenclature of Pliny, who tells us, that such and such artists flourished at such and such an Olympiad ;-a method which has unfortunately left us in the greatest incertitude upon this

interesting point, since the life of each must have extended over several Olympiads. We are, therefore, in a state of entire ignorance as to the order and succession of the schools, as they arose in Greece. With these deductions, however, we have no doubt that Pliny, who drew his materials from Grecian chronicles* no longer in existence, was, generally speaking, accurate in his statements.

We are inclined to rank the vaunted excellence of Etruscan painting among the dreams of the learned. The Etrurians must have derived their conceptions of art from the Egyptians, whose forms were uncouth and rough, and executed in total defiance of rule and proportion, the study of anatomy being interdicted by their superstition. It is in Greece, then, that we must look for the earliest schools of painting. But before the time of Phidias, we must not expect to find the grand masterpieces of art. Those who preceded that era, seem to have resembled the Italian artists of the middle age, Guido of Sienna, Giotto, and Cimabue. Panaceus, the brother of Phidias, painted the battle of Marathon,-a subject calculated to flatter the pride and patriotism of the Athenians. The correctness of the drawing and the truth of the colouring were highly extolled. Polygnotus was the Corregio of antiquity: like Nicholas Poussin, he embellished his landscapes with the most beautiful architecture. Parrhasius, Apollodorus, Zeuxis, Androcydes, and Timanthes seem to follow; but in what order of succession, or with what intervals, it is impossible, for the reasons we have already hinted, to ascertain. The celebrated contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius does not, perhaps, attest so high a state of the art, nor so great a conflict of genius as Count Orloff supposes. Zeuxis had painted a bunch of grapes with such exactness, that the birds pecked at them: Parrhasius, to deceive his friend by a similar illusion, painted merely a curtain, which appeared to conceal one of his recent productions, and told Zeuxis that he had just finished a piece, on which he wished to have his opinion. Zeuxis, anxious to see it, instantly attempted to undraw the curtain. But this was the triumph of skill, not of genius. How inferior to the sublime conception of Timanthes, who, in his picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, veils the countenance of Agamemnon, to delineate the more forcibly the sorrows of a parent, or rather, to intimate that they

Heyne on the Epochs of Grecian Art, as pointed out by Pliny, Gottingen, 1785.