a sort of feeling that I ought to be turned out, since I don't come there to pray-we returned to the coach-stand, where, having made a bargain with a charioteer to drive us hither and thither for five hours, we proceeded in regular traveller's fashion, to do all the churches, palaces, gardens, and fountains, that could be crammed into the time. The result of all which, in my mind, was one huge hodge-podge of black, red, and white marble, gilding, pictures, statues, pretty coloured floors and ceilings. Fortunately, the divine blue sky, and the pleasant hanging gardens, with their dark-green leaves and golden fruit, gave me some repose between each sight; but I think, to look at a kaleidoscope for an hour together, is nearly as pleasant, and quite as profitable, as this sort of succession of sights.'

We quote these passages simply as characteristic-as showing how thought and feeling are blended with observation in this book. In short, it is eminently suggestive, and constantly sets us thinking, but not always in the right direction; and the pettiest provocation on the road, is often enough to unhinge the mind and disturb the judgment of the writer. Get her to Italy, and she rises with the subject; yet, even here, we often wish that her genius was of a softer character, and that she would less frequently remind us of Pope's couplet on another lady—

'Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create,

As when she touch'd the brink of all we hate.'

For example, she sends for change for a gold piece, and counts it wrong; an Italian lacquey (as many French or English, and all Swiss lacqueys, would have done) permits her to cheat herself; and forthwith an entire people is condemned.

Of such experiences, one day in Italy is full; and not all the glory of the past can atone to me for the present shame of the people, nor all the loveliness of external things make up for the ugliness of human souls without truth or honour. Women without chastity, and men without integrity, and a whole country without religion, make a poor residence, in my humble judgment, unless one could be turned into one's eyes, and all one's perceptions be limited to the faculty of seeing the Divine beauty which this baseness mars.'-Vol. ii. p. 49.

We earnestly entreat Mrs Butler to turn to Corinne (Book 5, c. 3), and read over carefully the letter to Lord Nelvil; and we are quite sure she will never again be guilty of such injustice, or repeat such platitudes. Nay, what she herself has told us of the feelings of the Roman populace for the new Pope, suggests a conclusive answer to her own diatribe-by showing, at the same time, the corrupting character of the hitherto existing government and institutions, and the impotence even of such government and such institutions to crush the native spirit of

the people, or keep down their enthusiasm for what is noble, generous, and good

'Oh, give but a hope, let a vista but gleam

Through the gloom of their country, and mark how they'd feel.'

After all, the gems of this book are the poetry; and it is a curious fact that Mrs Butler, so careless, so occasionally unrefined, in her prose writings, is always uniformly correct, chastened, and refined in verse.

Rome ought never to be visited for the first time as a consolation; the mind should be entirely free from all impressions unconnected with the genius of the place; and the associations which the first sight of it may be expected to call up, have been best described in an unrivalled and well-known passage by Mr Alison. But, considered merely as an eloquent, almost involuntary outpouring of melancholy thoughts, nothing can well be finer than Mrs Butler's lines (vol. i. p. 118) beginningEarly in life, when hope seems prophecy,

And strong desire can sometimes mould a fate,
My dream was of thy shores, O Italy!

But l'homme propose, Dieu dispose; and when she does come,

it is

Not in that season of my life, when life
Itself was rich enough for all its need,
And I yet held its whole inheritance;
But in the bankrupt days when all is spent,
Bestow'd, or stolen, wasted, given away,
To buy a store of bitter memories.'-

It is sad to dwell upon such a picture, and know that it is a copy from the life. Yet these pages abound with indications of improvement, moral and mental; and we think we may venture to say that the wanderer has been at least partially consoled. Mixed up with the burst of indignation, the sigh of despondency, and the hardly suppressed cry of despair, are better, far better things. Let the reader who has been repelled by the reflections suggested by the dishonest lacquey, turn, by way of antidote, to those suggested by the port of Marseilles (vol. i. p. 98); and (as regards merely the utility of the publication) it would be injustice not to say, before concluding, that Mrs Butler's account of the new Papal policy is the clearest that has yet appeared in English to our knowledge: that there is a very curious account of the real origin of Werther (pp. 129-141) in the second volume; and (though we wish she had been a little more charitable to her own countrymen) that many of her hints, if taken in good part, might materially aid in removing the prejudices which unluckily still prevail against both American and English travellers on the Continent.

ART. IX.-1. Materials for a History of Oil Painting. By CHARLES LOCK EASTLAKE, R.A., F.R.S., F.S.A., Secretary to the Royal Commission for Promoting the Fine Arts in connexion with the re-building the Houses of Parliament, &c. &c. London: 1847.

2.

A Copy of the Minutes of the Trustees of the National Gallery, during the years 1845 and 1846, with the names of all the Trustees present at each meeting; also copies of the orders and instructions to the Keeper of the Gallery respecting the cleaning of the Pictures, and any directions in respect to this arrangement; and of any other documents thereto.' Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 4th February 1847.

W HEN Diderot was told that Descamps had taken to writing instead of painting, he is said to have addressed him in the following words:- On dit que vous vous mêlez de littérature; Dieu veuille que vous soyez meilleur en belles lettres, qu'en peinture.' In a very different spirit ought the public to address Mr Eastlake. When, as this year, we miss his pictures from the exhibition of the Royal Academy, we regret that he is so much occupied with other matters; on the other hand, when we open this book, we cannot but lament that the author should not be entirely devoted to literature. It is seldom, indeed, that such qualifications for writing on the history of painting meet in the same person, or that practical excellence and ardent love for his own art are seconded, as in this case, by the capacity for acquiring knowledge, and communicating it in an agreeable form. The title of Mr Eastlake's book is singularly modest; more information is to be found in his Materials for a History of Oil Painting' than is generally comprised in works with much more pompous denominations.

The history of oil painting is deeply interesting in itself, as involving an account of that mode of execution which is now most prevalent in Europe, and which is certainly most applicable to cabinet pictures. Whatever may be the merits of fresco on a large scale, oil-painting is far superior to all other methods, in the power of combining force and substance with transparency. It is, moreover, the exception in the history of art; it is the gift of the North to the South. The artists of France, Flanders, and Germany, have gone forth in successive swarms to imbibe instruction in Italy; but oil-painting was substantially created in the Low Countries, and shot up there at once to a perfection which it has never yet exceeded. To this question, however,

we shall return. But before we attempt to give a summary of the results arrived at by our author, it is necessary shortly to state the nature of the material itself, the application of which to painting is the subject of his book.

There is one class of oils known as drying oils-such as poppy oil, linseed oil, and walnut oil-which have the quality of thickening by the absorption of oxygen, on exposure to the air, and which thus dry up with greater or less rapidity; this tendency may be increased by the addition of litharge, or any metallic oxide, which supplies the oxygen to the oil in greater abundance and more quickly than it could otherwise obtain it. There is another class, the unctuous oils-like olive oil-which may be said never to dry for such a purpose as painting; while a third kind, the volatile or essential oils-such as oil of turpentine, or oil of lavender-are odoriferous, from readily diffusing themselves through the atmosphere, and may be distilled without losing their qualities.

The manufacture of drying oils must have preceded the use of oil as a vehicle for colour, even in the warmest climates. We are tolerably certain that the ancients did not practise oil painting; but it is, Mr Eastlake observes, by no means so clear, that the materials for this process were unknown even in the time of the most celebrated artists of antiquity. Walnut oil and poppy oil were known to Dioscorides. The juice of linseed is mentioned by Hippocrates, and its drying qualities are especially noticed by Galen. The oil extracted from walnuts occurs among those enumerated by Pliny. Aetius (a physician of the sixth century) speaks of drying oils in connexion with works of art, since he mentions the application of walnut oil, on account of its desiccative qualities, by gilders and encaustic painters. Thus then, as Mr Eastlake says, the prin'cipal materials employed in modern oil-painting were, at least, 'ready for the artist, and waited only for a Van Eyck, in the age of Ludius and the painters of Pompeii'-(p. 15.) Nor is it at all clear that many of the processes handed down to the painters of the middle ages were not derived from the ancients. There was long an intimate connexion between medicine and painting; the dispensary or laboratory of the Christian convent furnished at once the drugs which were administered in the former, and the pigments which were required by the latter art. The monks were in this, as in other matters, the depositaries of all the traditional knowledge coming down from earlier times; and while the institution of a body corporate, like a convent, was admirably adapted for storing such information, the pursuits of their daily life gave them every inducement to preserve and apply

the secrets relating both to physic and painting. Nothing can be more curious than the notion of a Frenchman taking out of the hand of an ecclesiastical painter in the monastery of Mount Athos, such a MS. as that from which M. Didron has printed his 'Manuel d'Iconographie Chrétienne.' The technical recipés of the Byzantine Empire-as applied, not merely to the execution, but to the conception of the picture-are found in everyday use, and are thus made to circulate through Europe in a French translation.

Derived from such sources, traces of the application of drying oils to the arts continue through the period which elapsed between Aetius and Van Eyck; linseed oil, however, was preferred to others for making varnish, up to the time of the latter artist. At the close of the 15th, or beginning of the 16th century, artists began to employ the varnishes made with the essential oils. Our author says

In the preceding chapter it has been shown that walnut oil (probably thickened in the sun to the consistence of a varnish) was employed in the fifth century to protect paintings and gilt surfaces; and that a varnish, in which linseed-oil was a chief ingredient, was used for similar purposes in the eighth century. It has been seen that the linseed-oil varnish, improved and simplified in its preparation, was common in the twelfth century, at which time a thickened oil, without resin, was also employed. In neither of the documents whence these notices are taken, is there any allusion to the immixture of solid pigments with the oils. The only approach to such a method, consisted in tinging the varnish with a transparent yellow, and spreading it over tinfoil, to imitate gold. Directions for preparing such a composition are given in two of the earliest sources above referred to, viz., the "Lucca Treatise" and the "Mappa Clavicula." The process was common in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and appears to have been adopted for some of the decorations in St Stephen's Chapel at Westminster.

The earliest writers who distinctly describe the mixture of solid colours with oil, for the purposes of painting, are Eraclius, Theophilus, Peter de St Audemar, and the unknown author of a similar treatise, which is preserved in the British Museum. To these sources are to be added some authentic records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which prove that the methods described in contemporary treatises on art, were then occasionally practised. These materials furnish a criterion for fixing the original date of certain later references to oil-painting, or rather to its primitive methods; they show that some of those directions, though written in the fifteenth century, were merely repetitions of older formulæ, and consequently had no connexion with the improvements introduced by Van Eyck.'-(pp. 30, 31.)

Before we proceed to discuss the position and merits of the great Flemish master, we must detain the reader for a short time, in order to lay before him the nature of the authorities