but returned to the Gorge and Vulter to engage a sleepless bed for the night. But not being bed time I set down to anser your faver, on referring to which put me in mind to inquire of his frend sum Reprobate of course at the Coffee shop in Drury Lane and the same being handy instead of the letter I posted off myself and asked if Mr. Shearing was known at the House. Which he was. So I was showed into the Coffee room, into a privit box and sure enuf there he were not his frend but himself, havin only used the other name for an Alibi. However there he were, with a siggar in his mouth and a glass of Negus afore him which I indignently drunk up myself and then demandid an account of his misconduct, Errers not Excepted. Which he give. So the long and the short is he made a full Confession whereby it apears insted of goin abroad he was never out of London at least not further then Hide Park Corner to a Chinees Exibition and where he pickt up his confounded Long Tungs and Slang Wangs and Swan Pans and every attum he knows of them infurnal Celestials.

As mite be expected his Cash including my £30 was all squandered mostly I suppose for bottles of wine and smoke,-and such little desideratums. His goold watch went a month ago—and the bullocks trunks as I predicted grew out of his own Head. So much for a shinin caracter

and a Genus above the common. As such you will soon have dear Gus on your own hands agin, at Wisbech, where if Uncles may advise as well as contribit he will be placed with some steddy tradesman to lern a bisness, Unless praps you prefer him to have an Appintment in the next Expedition to Bottany Bay. With which I remain, dear Sister, Your loving Brother,

London. November the 28th, 1842.

ABEL DOTTIN.

P.S. I did hope to save the new Shurts, out of the fire. But to use his own words they are Spouted and he have lost the Ticket.

A LATE TOUR IN SEARCH OF THE PICTURESQUE.

BY LAMAN BLANCHARD, ESQ.

"THEY are, indeed, a lovely pair," said I, when the dining-room door had closed upon good, quiet Mrs. Sharpson and her elderly maiden sister, and with the intimation that coffee would be ready in half an hour, we had been left alone with our glasses and nutcrackers.

"Yes, they are, indeed, a most lovely pair!"

But the rapturous remark was not applied (I am ashamed to say) to the two reserved and respectable ladies who had just quitted the room. It was addressed, with considerable fervour of emphasis, to a pair of small pictures which smiled upon me in a favourable light from the opposite wall, as I drew my chair to the left-side of the fire to match the position of Sharpson on the right.

"You were devouring them all dinner-time," said he, "and your hunger doesn't appear to be in the least abated. What is it you see in them? They are but sketches, you know."

"What do I see in them? Form, colour, elevated grace, ideal beauty, sublime simplicity, and power. The girl there, with her patches of loose drapery which the wandering air of heaven might blow about as it listeth, was born under a loftier and lovelier star than the conscious wearer of the rarest laces and satins which Chalon ever took pains to paint. The old woman, on the other bit of canvass, may have been Phocion's mother, or a sibyl, or an empress by divine right. There she sits; whether on an old oak-tree root, or in a carved-chair, or on a broken column amidst the ruins of an empire, I can't make out; the scene may be a tangled wood, a wild moor, or a castle hall; but she is sitting on a throne braver than Cleopatra's. What wondrous riches may not the fancy work out of that endless mine, the Obscure! How captivating and ethereal are the beauties which art, pausing in her elaborate work, only ventures to indicate by a magic touch!

"Sketches!" I continued-" yes, verily as you say, these things before us are but sketches-yet they are perfection. The imagination of the painter has outstripped his hand-the genius has been too quick and subtle for the mechanical process-a grand effect flashes out of utter darkness upon the searching eye, kindling and rewarding the sensibilities of the inquirer-and art, not satisfied indeed, yet charmed, hazarded no further effort, but dropped her useless tools. Wise distrust, or if you will inspired laziness, of the painter, that refused to finish the designs! Great master of the rare art to forbear! Here, in this splendid smear, and again in that dazzling smudge, we discern all that his soul contemplated, and possibly much more than his skill, exercised for half an age, could have expressed."

"Ay, ay," said Sharpson, quietly cracking a walnut, "you needn't tell me, I know all about it. Times and places are every thing to people who set themselves up as oracles upon art. The things they were in raptures with yesterday, are daubs to-day; and the same picture which if sold as trash amidst the lumber of an old farmhouse, or the rubbish of a country-inn, they wouldn't bid three-farthings for, they would hold to be deuced fine and cheap at three hundred pounds if they saw it in the Grosvenor collection! I know all about it. Take some wine, and then push it this way."

As I well knew my old companion was always a little sarcastic upon any exhibition of enthusiasm for this reason, perhaps, that he had himself, between the ages of fifteen and fifty, experienced at least a dozen fits of enthusiasm in relation to as many arts or pursuits-bookcollecting at one time, picture-seeking at another, and moth-catching at a third,-learned in horses now, deep in experimental chemistry next year, and then engineering more eagerly still,-over the ankles in gardening to-day, and up to the neck in farming to-morrow; aware, I say, that his life had been one successive scene of enthusiastic fits, and that his present cue was to deride enthusiasm and to doubt its sincerity, I was not in the least offended at his sarcastic tone, and the smile delicately edged with a sneer that followed his remark.

"What!" I exclaimed; "you astonish me beyond expression. You, the possessor of those masterly sketches, to disparage them! to doubt their effects! to suppose their beauty may be before the eye and not seen, presented to the sense and not felt! For my own part, had I met them on the plains of Hindostan, I had worshipped them."

"Had you met them," returned Sharpson, pushing back the port, "at an old rag-shop in Leather-lane, with "for sale, seven-and-sixpence' chalked upon their sublimity; had you seen them hanging upon the whitewashed walls of the Stag's Head, amidst portraits of winning horses and prize oxen, with samplers by youthful human prodigies more astonishing still-you should have examined them for an hour without discovering a beauty. The fat heifer weighing one-tenth of Smithfieldmarket, or the correct likeness of Mr. Smash's blood-mare' Bolt,' you would regard with some interest, and forgive the villanous picture in consideration of its being what it professes to be. But the sublime and beautiful in my sketches, would never have flashed out upon you from those obscure walls. Expecting nothing poetical in so unlikely a nook, you would discern no genius on the smeared canvass; you would think them the failures of the man who painted the sign outside the house; and would either laugh at the absurd beginnings for their downright burlesque, or scorn them for the impudence of their pretension. I'll trouble you for the salt."

"And you really think that I should-I, who-"

You

"You, who go to the exhibition every year, and drop into the National Gallery or the Dulwich once in three, or as often as a sight-seeing relation from the country comes scrambling about London. needn't tell me, I know all about it. I never yet acquired knowledge enough on any subject to feel myself quite sure of being in the right, but I have gone sufficiently deep into many to be certain that other people are in the wrong. On this one subject, in particular, they know nothing. When I speak of you, I mean the world-you can't be offended if you have your fellow-creatures on your side, and I freely make you a present of them."

"But," I urged, " your argument carries you further than you intended, and lands you in a palpable error; for it supposes a general want of that sense of the beautiful, and that strong perception of some particular features of it, which so far from being a rarity in society is a general characteristic. You will hardly deny that very ordinary persons, whatever they may think of their own faces, are not blind to the good looks of others that a common impression is produced on a common crowd by the sight of a handsome woman-that the stupidest starers find something to gaze upon when the moonlight silvers a pile of ancient buildings-and that the vulgar when they glance round a rich summer-landscape, or behold a magnificent sea-view, have a touch of the universal joy and refinement produced by the universal inspirer, the Presence of Beauty."

"Yes, and if art were only what you seem to consider it, I should be silent; but their appreciation of handsome faces and moonlit buildings, is all they carry with them into picture-galleries. Hence their understanding ends where the imaginative in art begins, and their feelings are alone interested by what is literal and exact. The most correct and best made-out pieces charm them most. The most vulgar and rigid copy is to their eyes most like the original. They see the likeness of the handsome face, and a miniature view of the woody mountain-they comprehend them, and are satisfied. Their little souls expand to receive the commonplace. My fine sketches there would be rare hieroglyphics to the good shilling-paying people."

"And yet," I responded, "the best artists are always the most admired. Some inferior ones may, from adventitious circumstances, obtain patronage in high places, but they do not command, even with this advantage, the popular voice. Whose names are most familiar to the public mouth? The names which the highest talent has made memorable. Around what pictures in an exhibition are the largest and most admiring crowds collected? The pictures which high talent has made glorious."

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Fashion," returned Sharpson, "holds sway more or less in every thing, and crowds beget crowds. Besides, there are some kinds of power which, employed on certain subjects, will always interest even the dull herd. But rarely indeed, save under the influence of fashion and flock-following, do the dull herd seek pasturage on the eminences of art. They prefer to leave the fair mountain' to 'batten on this moor,' where their low spirits are quite at home. Of course they do not go away without getting a glimpse of the pictures, the frames at all events, to which great names are attached; because they are aware that in the cant of the circle' in which they move, be it wide or narrow, they are required to take part; and they are alive to the necessity of falling into ecstasies, whether the present performances of those leading artists be exquisite or so-so. But it is the commonplace that in reality enchants them-the portrait of a lady, the kitten with the ball of cotton, the intolerable hamper of game, the detestable bunch of flowers, and the execrable basket of fruit."

"That such execrables are yearly exhibited in sundry places is admitted; but you are not thence to assume that they are admired—” "I prove it," interposed Sharpson, "when I prove that they are painted. Artists, good and bad, work for the market. The great painter, indeed, may find a liberal purchaser for his work; but the profound Incapable is almost sure of a customer. Why, what becomes of the hundreds of odious outrages annually sent forth! Do you think they are burned? They are bought. Somewhere shines the sun upon their horrible varnish, and some poor wretches' eyes have daily to endure the sight of them."

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Nay, if they are bought," cried I, "they cease to be atrocities. They instantly acquire a moral glow that gives a mellowing tone to their flaring hues-they are wrapt in a poetry of sentiment that redeems them from contempt. The act of purchase seals their pretensions as valuable works of art, and the thing of beauty is a joy for ever,' an heirloom on the walls of its owner."

"You substantiate the charge with which I started!" exclaimed Sharpson, upsetting his glass. "I said you judged of a picture by the wall on which it hung."

"The owner of it often does; but I have no pictures, and am a disinterested witness. It is the owner of the picture who is wall-eyed. Possession is nine points of criticism. The painting whose merit never struck him while seen by the light from a friend's window, becomes a work of tremendous power in the light shed upon it through his own. The bad specimen of an indifferent master, being the property of a neighbour, is transformed into an excellent specimen of a consummate genius, being hung in his own study. What was a poor copy while it was any body's proverty, is an undeniable original when his."

"What's that you say?" muttered Sharpson. "Did you ever see or rather did you ever hear of the man, who, boasting of pictures at all, failed to boast of them as perfections? Is not every body's little collection quite unique? Is it not every where understood that the large painting in the dining-room, with a particular hue over the flesh of the figures, is a Guido! Who doubts that the dark canvass dashed with light, exhibits the hand of Rembrandt? If any body, certainly it is not the possessor of such prizes. He is as thoroughly assured of the genuineness of that Salvator before his eyes, as he would have been doubtful of it a year ago, before he ever dreamed of its becoming his. He has not a bad picture, and scarcely an indifferent one, in his house. His sole doubt is, whether his favourites are the best things ever painted by the artists to whom he attributes them, or merely equal to the best. He is always sure that he prefers his own to the Duke of Devonshire's specimen. He has three times refused two hundred guineas at least for any one of them you may chance to suspect. You may doubt and dislike any thing that is his, rather than his pictures. Tell him that he has been ill-used by his wine-merchant; pick his costliest books to pieces as the genuine wastepaper editions-and you may be forgiven, while you forbear to hazard a suspicion that Velasquez never painted that man in red, or that Vandyck is as innocent of the lady in blue as the lady's child that is unborn."

"Dry work," said Sharpson, "some claret."

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"And you yourself," I continued, returning from generals to particuculars, with which the conversation had commenced, were you quite sure, when you attributed my appreciation of these sketches to the accident of finding them accredited and in capital company, that you were free from the usual bias in their favour created by the consciousness of their being your own? I believe that this idea of property enters insensibly but very largely into many of our tastes and opinions. Whatever is ours we esteem in a degree as part of us-self puts a golden gloss upon it. It is a modification of the intenser feeling with which we regard our children; we cannot for our lives see their snub noses and vicious tempers. They have sweet voices, clean faces, delightful dispositions, and there is no end to their prodigious cleverness, because they belong to us. They are ducks, loves, and angels-for they are ours. What are the very same children, the identical little nuisances, when they belong to the people over the way-"

"I beg-I beg pardon," interrupted Sharpson, "but really I must say-a-Mrs. Sharpson, as you are aware, has hitherto had no children-I mean, we have no family at present-but still these abusive epithets to a father's-that is, to a husband's ears-and besides you are wrong. If I had not fallen desperately in love with those two sketches, while they were the property of a stranger, they never would have been mine at all. Shall I tell you how I got them? What do you say y? Claret and a short story, or coffee and-"

it

"No, no; if there's to be a story indeed, we had better not inflict upon the ladies. So go on, I have filled already."

He began :

"In a common Covent-garden sale-room, heaped with a variety of goods, I first spied my treasures, in company with a great French