The preternatural imagery in all this medley is, we confess, (comparatively speaking) meagre and monotonous; but there is a squalid nudity, and a fiendish irony and scorn thrown over the whole, that is truly edifying. The scene presently after proceeds thus.

The latter part of the foregoing scene is to be found in both translations; but we prefer Mr. Shelley’s, if not for its elegance, for its simplicity and force. Lord Leveson Gower has given, at the end of his volume, a translation of Lessing’s Faust, as having perhaps furnished the hint for the larger production. There is an old tragedy of our own, founded on the same tradition, by Marlowe, in which the author has treated the subject according to the spirit of poetry, and the learning of his age. He has not evaded the main incidents of the fable (it was not the fashion of the dramatists of his day), nor sunk the chief character in glosses and episodes (however subtle or alluring), but has described Faustus’s love of learning, his philosophic dreams and raptures, his religious horrors and melancholy fate, with appropriate gloom or gorgeousness of colouring. The character of the old enthusiastic inquirer after the philosopher’s stone, and dealer with the Devil, is nearly lost sight of in the German play: its bold development forms the chief beauty and strength of the old English one. We shall not, we hope, be accused of wandering too far from the subject, if we conclude with some account of it in the words of a contemporary writer. ‘The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, though an imperfect and unequal performance, is Marlowe’s greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but is a gigantic one. This character may be considered as a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity, sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse. He is hurried away, and, as it were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art, and to extend his power with his knowledge. He would realize all the fictions of a lawless imagination, would solve the most subtle speculations of abstruse reason; and for this purpose, sets at defiance all mortal consequences, and leagues himself with demoniacal power, with “fate and metaphysical aid.” The idea of witchcraft and necromancy, once the dread of the vulgar, and the darling of the visionary recluse, seems to have had its origin in the restless tendency of the human mind, to conceive of, and aspire to, more than it can achieve by natural means; and in the obscure apprehension, that the gratification of this extravagant and unauthorized desire can only be attained by the sacrifice of all our ordinary hopes and better prospects, to the infernal agents that lend themselves to its accomplishment. Such is the foundation of the present story. Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at once, and for a few short years, all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is willing to give in exchange his soul and body to the great enemy of mankind. Whatever he fancies, becomes by this means present to his sense: whatever he commands, is done. He calls back time past, and anticipates the future: the visions of antiquity pass before him, Babylon in all its glory, Paris and Œnone: all the projects of philosophers, or creations of the poet, pay tribute at his feet: all the delights of fortune, of ambition, of pleasure and of learning, are centred in his person; and, from a short-lived dream of supreme felicity and drunken power, he sinks into an abyss of darkness and perdition. This is the alternative to which he submits; the bond which he signs with his blood! As the outline of the character is grand and daring, the execution is abrupt and fearful. The thoughts are vast and irregular, and the style halts and staggers under them.’^[20]

We are not among the devoted admirers of Lady Morgan. She is a clever and lively writer—but not very judicious, and not very natural. Since she has given up making novels, we do not think she has added much to her reputation—and indeed is rather more liable than before to the charge of tediousness and presumption. There is no want, however, either of amusement or instruction in her late performances—and we have no doubt she would write very agreeably, if she was only a little less ambitious of being always fine and striking. But though we are thus clear-sighted to her defects, we must say, that we have never seen anything more utterly unjust, or more disgusting and disgraceful, than the abuse she has had to encounter from some of our Tory journals—abuse, of which we shall say no more at present, than that it is incomparably less humiliating to the object than to the author.

Common justice seemed to require this observation from us—nor will it appear altogether out of place when we add, that we cannot but suspect that it is to a feeling connected with that subject that we are indebted for the work now before us. Salvator Rosa was, like his fair biographer, in hostility with the High-church and High-monarchy men of his day; and the enemy of the Holy Alliance, in the nineteenth century, must have followed with peculiar interest the fortunes of an artist who was so obnoxious to the suspicions of the Holy Office in the seventeenth.

There are few works more engaging than those which reveal to us the private history of eminent individuals; the lives of painters seem to be even more interesting than those of almost any other class of men; and, among painters, there are few names of greater note, or that have a more powerful attraction, than that of Salvator Rosa. We are not sure, however, that Lady Morgan’s work is not, upon the whole, more calculated to dissolve than to rivet the spell which these circumstances might, at first, throw over the reader’s mind. The great charm of biography consists in the individuality of the details, the familiar tone of the incidents, the bringing us acquainted with the persons of men whom we have formerly known only by their works or names, the absence of all exaggeration or pretension, and the immediate appeal to facts instead of theories. We are afraid, that, if tried by these rules, Lady Morgan will be found not to have written biography. A great part of the work is, accordingly, very fabulous and apocryphal. We are supplied with few anecdotes or striking traits, and have few data to go upon, during the early and most anxious period of Salvator’s life; but a fine opportunity is in this way afforded to conjecture how he did or did not pass his time; in what manner, and at what precise era, his peculiar talents first developed themselves; and how he must have felt in certain situations, supposing him ever to have been placed in them. In one place, for example, she employs several pages in describing Salvator’s being taken by his father from his village-home to the College of Somasco, with a detailed account of the garments in which he and his father may be presumed to have been dressed; the adieus of his mother and sisters; the streets, the churches by which they passed; in short, with an admirable panoramic view of the city of Naples and its environs, as it would appear to any modern traveller; and an assurance at the end, that ‘Such was the scenery of the Vomiro in the beginning of the seventeenth century; such is it now!’ Added to all which, we have, at every turn, pertinent allusions to celebrated persons who visited Rome and Italy in the same century, and perhaps wandered in the same solitudes, or were hid in the recesses of the same ruins; and learned dissertations on the state of the arts, sciences, morals, and politics, from the earliest records up to the present day. On the meagre thread of biography, in short, Lady Morgan has been ambitious to string the flowers of literature and the pearls of philosophy, and to strew over the obscure and half-forgotten origin of poor Salvator the colours of a sanguine enthusiasm and a florid imagination! So fascinated indeed is she with the splendour of her own style, that whenever she has a simple fact or well-authenticated anecdote to relate, she is compelled to apologize for the homeliness of the circumstance, as if the flat realities of her story were unworthy accompaniments to the fine imaginations with which she has laboured to exalt it.

We could have wished, certainly, that she had shown less pretension in this respect. Women write well, only when they write naturally: And therefore we could dispense with their inditing prize-essays or solving academic questions;—and should be far better pleased with Lady Morgan if she would condescend to a more ordinary style, and not insist continually on playing the diplomatist in petticoats, and strutting the little Gibbon of her age!

Another circumstance that takes from the interest of the present work is, that the subject of it was both an author and an artist, or, as Lady Morgan somewhat affectedly expresses it, a painter-poet. It is chiefly in the latter part of this compound character, or as a satirist, comic writer and actor, that he comes upon the stage in these volumes; and the enchantment of the scene is hurt by it.

The great secret of our curiosity respecting the lives of painters is, that they seem to be a different race of beings, and to speak a different language from ourselves. We want to see what is the connecting link between pictures and books, and how colours will translate into words. There is something mystical and anomalous to our conceptions in the existence of persons who talk by natural signs, and express their thoughts by pointing to the objects they wish to represent. When they put pen to paper, it is as if a dumb person should stammer out his meaning for the first time, or as if the bark of a tree (repeating the miracle in Virgil) should open its lips and discourse. We have no notion how Titian could be witty, or Raphael learned; and we wait for the solution of the problem, as for the result of some curious experiment in natural history. Titian’s acquitting himself of a compliment to Charles V., or Raphael’s writing a letter to a friend, describing his idea of the Galatea, excites our wonder, and holds us in a state of breathless suspense, more than the first having painted all the masterpieces of the Escurial, or than the latter’s having realized the divine idea in his imagination. Because they have a language which we want, we fancy they must want, or cannot be at home in ours;—we start and blush to find, that, though few are painters, all men are, and naturally must be, orators and poets. We have a stronger desire to see the autographs of artists than of authors or emperors; for we somehow cannot imagine in what manner they would form their tottering letters, or sign their untaught names. We in fact exercise a sort of mental superiority and imaginary patronage over them (delightful in proportion as it is mixed up with a sense of awe and homage in other respects); watch their progress like that of grown children; are charmed with the imperfect glimmerings of wit or sense; and secretly expect to find them,—or express all the impertinence of an affected surprise if we do not—what Claude Lorraine is here represented to have been out of his painting room, little better than natural changelings and drivellers. It pleases us therefore to be told, that Gaspar Poussin, when he was not painting, rode a hunting; that Nicolas was (it is pretended) a miser and a pedant—that Domenichino was retired and modest, and Guido and Annibal Caracci unfortunate! This is as it should be, and flatters our self-love. Their works stand out to ages bold and palpable, and dazzle or inspire by their beauty and their brilliancy;—That is enough—the rest sinks into the ground of obscurity, or is only brought out as something odd and unaccountable by the patient efforts of good-natured curiosity. But all this fine theory and flutter of contradictory expectations is balked and knocked on the head at once, when, instead of a dim and shadowy figure in the back-ground, a mere name, of which nothing is remembered but its immortal works, a poor creature performing miracles of art, and not knowing how it has performed them, a person steps forward, bold, gay, gaillard, with all his faculties about him, master of a number of accomplishments which he is not backward to display, mingling with the throng, looking defiance around, able to answer for himself, acquainted with his own merits, and boasting of them, not merely having the gift of speech, but a celebrated improvisatore, musician, comic actor and buffoon, patriot and cynic, reciting and talking equally well, taking up his pen to write satires, and laying it down to paint them. There is a vulgarity in all this practical bustle and restless stage-effect, that takes away from that abstracted and simple idea of art which at once attracts and baffles curiosity, like a distinct element in nature. ‘Painting,’ said Michael Angelo, is jealous, and requires the whole man to herself.’ And there is some thing sacred and privileged in the character of those heirs of fame, and their noiseless reputation, which ought not, we think, to be gossipped to the air, babbled to the echo, or proclaimed by beat of drum at the corners of streets, like a procession or a puppet-show. We may peep and pry into the ordinary life of painters, but it will not do to strip them stark-naked. A speaking portrait of them—an anecdote or two—an expressive saying dropped by chance—an incident marking the bent of their genius, or its fate, are delicious; but here we should draw the curtain, or we shall profane this sort of image-worship. Least of all do we wish to be entertained with private brawls, or professional squabbles, or multifarious pretensions. ‘The essence of genius,’ as Lady Morgan observes, ‘is concentration.’ So is that of enthusiasm. We lay down the ‘Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,’ therefore, with less interest in the subject than when we took it up. We had rather not read it. Instead of the old and floating traditions on the subject,—instead of the romantic name and romantic pursuits of the daring copyist of Nature, conversing with her rudest forms, or lost in lonely musing,—eyeing the clouds that roll over his head, or listening to the waterfal, or seeing the fresh breeze waving the mountain-pines, or leaning against the side of an impending rock, or marking the bandit that issues from its clefts, ‘housing with wild men, with wild usages,’ himself unharmed and free,—and bequeathing the fruit of his uninterrupted retirement and out-of-doors studies as the best legacy to posterity,—we have the Coviello of the Carnival, the causeur of the saloons, the political malecontent, the satirist, sophist, caricaturist, the trafficker with Jews, the wrangler with courts and academies, and, last of all, the painter of history, despising his own best works, and angry with all who admired or purchased them.

The worst fault that Lady Morgan has committed is in siding with this infirmity of poor Salvator, and pampering him into a second Michael Angelo. The truth is, that the judgment passed upon him by his contemporaries was right in this respect. He was a great landscape painter; but his histories were comparatively forced and abortive. If this had been merely the opinion of his enemies, it might have been attributed to envy and faction; but it was no less the deliberate sentiment of his friends and most enthusiastic partisans; and if we reflect on the nature of our artist’s genius or his temper, we shall find that it could not well have been otherwise. This from a child was wayward, indocile, wild and irregular, unshackled, impatient of restraint, and urged on equally by success or opposition into a state of jealous and morbid irritability. Those who are at war with others, are not at peace with themselves. It is the uneasiness, the turbulence, the acrimony within that recoils upon external objects. Barry abused the Academy, because he could not paint himself. If he could have painted up to his own idea of perfection, he would have thought this better than exposing the ill-directed efforts or groundless pretensions of others. Salvator was rejected by the Academy of St. Luke, and excluded, in consequence of his hostility to reigning authorities, and his unlicensed freedom of speech, from the great works and public buildings in Rome; and though he scorned and ridiculed those by whose influence this was effected, yet neither the smiles of friends and fortune, nor the flatteries of fame, which in his lifetime had spread his name over Europe, and might be confidently expected to extend it to a future age, could console him for the loss, which he affected to despise, and would make no sacrifice to obtain. He was indeed hard to please. He denounced his rivals and maligners with bitterness; and with difficulty tolerated the enthusiasm of his disciples, or the services of his patrons. He was at all times full of indignation, with or without cause. He was easily exasperated, and not willing soon to be appeased, or to subside into repose and good humour again. He slighted what he did best; and seemed anxious to go out of himself. In a word, irritability rather than sensibility, was the category of his mind: he was more distinguished by violence and restlessness of will, than by dignity or power of thought. The truly great, on the contrary, are sufficient to themselves, and so far satisfied with the world. ‘Their mind to them is a kingdom,’ from which they look out, as from a high watchtower or noble fortress, on the passions, the cabals, the meannesses and follies of mankind. They shut themselves up ‘in measureless content;’ or soar to the great, discarding the little; and appeal from envious detraction or ‘unjust tribunals under change of times,’ to posterity. They are not satirists, cynics, nor the prey of these; but painters, poets, and philosophers.

Salvator was the victim of a too morbid sensibility, or of early difficulty and disappointment. He was always quarrelling with the world, and lay at the mercy of his own piques and resentments. But antipathy, the spirit of contradiction, captious discontent, fretful impatience, produce nothing fine in character, neither dwell on beauty, nor pursue truth, nor rise into sublimity. The splenetic humourist is not the painter of humanity. Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy. Our artist, escaping from the herd of knaves and fools, sought out some rude solitude, and found repose there. Teased by the impertinence, stung to the quick by the injustice of mankind, the presence of the works of nature would be a relief to his mind, and would, by contrast, stamp her striking features more strongly there. In the coolness, in the silence, in the untamed wildness of mountain scenery, in the lawless manners of its inhabitants, he would forget the fever and the anguish, and the artificial restraints of society. We accordingly do not find in Salvator’s rural scenes either natural beauty or fertility, or even the simply grand; but whatever seizes attention by presenting a barrier to the will, or scorning the power of mankind, or snapping asunder the chain that binds us to the kind—the barren, the abrupt, wild steril regions, the steep rock, the mountain torrent, the bandit’s cave, the hermit’s cell,—all these, while they released him from more harassing and painful reflections, soothed his moody spirit with congenial gloom, and found a sanctuary and a home there. Not only is there a corresponding determination and singleness of design in his landscapes (excluding every approach to softness, or pleasure, or ornament), but the strength of the impression is confirmed even by the very touch and mode of handling; he brings us in contact with the objects he paints; and the sharpness of a rock, the roughness of the bark of a tree, or the ruggedness of a mountain path are marked in the freedom, the boldness, and firmness of his pencilling. There is not in Salvator’s scenes the luxuriant beauty and divine harmony of Claude, nor the amplitude of Nicolas Poussin, nor the gorgeous richness of Titian—but there is a deeper seclusion, a more abrupt and total escape from society, more savage wildness and grotesqueness of form, a more earthy texture, a fresher atmosphere, and a more obstinate resistance to all the effeminate refinements of art. Salvator Rosa then is, beyond all question, the most romantic of landscape painters; because the very violence and untractableness of his temper threw him with instinctive force upon those objects in nature which would be most likely to sooth and disarm it; while, in history, he is little else than a caricaturist (we mean compared with such men as Raphael, Michael Angelo, &c.), because the same acrimony and impatience have made him fasten on those subjects and aspects of the human mind which would most irritate and increase it; and he has, in this department, produced chiefly distortion and deformity, sullenness and rage, extravagance, squalidness, and poverty of appearance. But it is time to break off this long and premature digression, into which our love of justice and of the arts (which requires, above all, that no more than justice should be done to any one) had led us, and return to the elegant but somewhat fanciful specimen of biography before us. Lady Morgan (in her flattery of the dead, the most ill-timed and unprofitable, but least disgusting of all flattery) has spoken of the historical compositions of Salvator in terms that leave no distinction between him and Michael Angelo; and we could not refrain from entering our protest against such an inference, and thus commencing our account of her book with what may appear at once a piece of churlish criticism and a want of gallantry.

The materials of the first volume, containing the account of Salvator’s outset in life, and early struggles with fortune and his art, are slender, but spun out at great length, and steeped in very brilliant dyes. The contents of the second volume, which relates to a period when he was before the public, was in habits of personal intimacy with his future biographers, and made frequent mention of himself in letters to his friends which are still preserved, are more copious and authentic, and on that account—however Lady Morgan may wonder at it—more interesting. Of the artist’s infant years, little is known, and little told; but that little is conveyed with all the ‘pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious’ authorship. It is said, that the whole matter composing the universe might be compressed in a nutshell, taking away the porous interstices and flimsy appearances: So, we apprehend, that all that is really to be learnt of the subject of these Memoirs from the first volume of his life, might be contained in a single page of solid writing.

It appears that our artist was born in 1615, of poor parents, in the Borgo de Renella, near Naples. His father, Vito Antonio Rosa, was an architect and landsurveyor, and his mother’s name was Giulia Grecca, who had also two daughters. Salvator very soon lost his full baptismal name for the nickname of Salvatoriello, in consequence of his mischievous tricks and lively gesticulations when a boy, or, more probably, this was the common diminutive of it given to all children. He was intended by his parents for the church, but early showed a truant disposition, and a turn for music and drawing. He used to scrawl with burnt sticks on the walls of his bed-room, and contrived to be caught in the fact of sketching outlines on the chapel-walls of the Certosa, when some priests were going by to mass, for which he was severely whipped. He was then sent to school at the monastery of the Somasco in Naples, where he remained for two years, and laid in a good stock of classical learning, of which he made great use in his after life, both in his poems and pictures. Salvator’s first knowledge of painting was imbibed in the workshop of Francesco Francanzani (a painter at that time of some note in Naples), who had married one of his sisters, and under whose eye he began his professional studies. Soon after this he is supposed to have made a tour through the mountains of the Abruzzi, and to have been detained a prisoner by the banditti there. On the death of his father, he endeavoured to maintain his family by sketches in landscape or history, which he sold to the brokers in Naples, and one of these (his Hagar in the Wilderness), was noticed and purchased by the celebrated Lanfranco, who was passing the broker’s shop in his carriage. Salvator finding it in vain to struggle any longer with chagrin and poverty in his native place, went to Rome, where he met with little encouragement, and fell sick, and once more returned to Naples. An accident, or rather the friendship of an old school-fellow, now introduced him into the suite of the Cardinal Brancaccia, and his picture of Prometheus brought him into general notice, and recalled him to Rome. About the same time, he appeared in the Carnival with prodigious eclat as an improvisatore and comic actor; and from this period may be dated the commencement of his public life as a painter, a satirist, and a man of general talents.

Except on these few tangible points the Manuscript yawns dreadfully; but Lady Morgan, whose wit or courage never flags, fills up the hollow spaces, and ‘skins and films the missing part,’ with an endless and dazzling profusion of digressions, invectives, and hypotheses. It is with pleasure that we give a specimen of the way in which she thus magnifies trifles, and enlarges on the possibilities of her subject. Salvator was born in 1615. As the birth of princes is announced by the discharge of artillery and the exhibition of fireworks, her ladyship thinks proper to usher in the birth of her hero with the following explosion of imagery and declamation.

‘The sweeping semicircle which the most fantastic and singular city of Naples marks on the shore of its unrivalled bay, from the Capo di Pausilippo to the Torrione del Carmine, is dominated by a lofty chain of undulating hills, which take their distinctive appellations from some local peculiarity or classical tradition. The high and insulated rock of St. Elmo, which overtops the whole, is crowned by that terrible fortress to which it gives its name—a fearful and impregnable citadel, that, since the first moment when it was raised by an Austrian conqueror to the present day, when it is garrisoned by a Bourbon with Austrian troops, has poured down the thunder of its artillery to support the violence, or proclaim the triumphs of foreign interference over the rights and liberties of a long-suffering and oft-resisting people.

‘Swelling from the base of the savage St. Elmo, smile the lovely heights of San Martino, where, through chestnut woods and vineyards, gleam the golden spires of the monastic palace of the Monks of the Certosa.^[21] A defile cut through the rocks of the Monte Donzelle, and shaded by the dark pines which spring from their crevices, forms an umbrageous pathway from this superb convent to the Borgeo di Renella, the little capital of a neighbouring hill, which, for the peculiar beauty of its position, and the views it commands, is still called “l’ameno villaggio.” At night the fires of Vesuvius almost bronze the humble edifices of Renella; and the morning sun, as it rises, discovers from various points, the hills of Vomiro and Pausilippo, the shores of Puzzuoli and of Baiæ, the islets of Nisiti, Capri, and Procida, till the view fades into the extreme verge of the horizon, where the waters of the Mediterranean seem to mingle with those clear skies whose tint and lustre they reflect.

‘In this true “nido paterno” of genius, there dwelt, in the year 1615, an humble and industrious artist called Vito Antonia Rosa—a name even then not unknown to the arts, though as yet more known than prosperous. Its actual possessor, the worthy Messire Antonio, had, up to this time, struggled with his good wife Giulia Grecca and two daughters still in childhood, to maintain the ancient respectability of his family. Antonio was an architect and landsurveyor of some note, but of little gains; and if, over the old architectural portico of the Casaccia of Renella might be read,

the intimation was given in vain! Few passed through the decayed Borgo of Renella, and still fewer, in times so fearful, were able to profit by the talents and profession which the inscription advertised. The family of Rosa, inconsiderable as it was, partook of the pressure of the times; and the pretty Borgo, like its adjacent scenery, (no longer the haunt of Consular voluptuaries, neither frequented by the great nor visited by the curious) stood lonely and beautiful—unencumbered by those fantastic belvideras and grotesque pavilions, which in modern times rather deform than beautify a site, for which Nature has done all, and Art can do nothing.

‘The cells of the Certosa, indeed, had their usual complement of lazy monks and “Frati conversi.” The fortress of St. Elmo, then as now, manned by Austrian troops, glittered with foreign pikes. The cross rose on every acclivity, and the sword guarded every pass: but the villages of Renella and San Martino, of the Vomiro and of Pausilippo, were thinned of their inhabitants to recruit foreign armies; and this earthly paradise was dreary as the desert, and silent as the tomb.

‘The Neapolitan barons, those restless but brave feudatories, whose resistance to their native despots preserved something of the ancient republican spirit of their Greek predecessors, now fled from the capital. They left its beautiful environs to Spanish viceroys, and to their official underlings; and sullenly shut themselves up in their domestic fortresses of the Abruzzi or of Calabria. “La Civiltà,” a class then including the whole of the middle and professional ranks of society of Naples, was struggling for a bare existence in the towns and cities. Beggared by taxation levied at the will of their despots, and collected with every aggravation of violence, its members lived under the perpetual surveillance of foreign troops and domestic sbirri, whose suspicions their brooding discontents were well calculated to nourish.

‘The people—the debased, degraded people—had reached that maximum of suffering beyond which human endurance cannot go. They were famished in the midst of plenty, and, in regions the most genial and salubrious, were dying of diseases, the fearful attendants on want. Commerce was at a stand, agriculture was neglected, and the arts, under the perpetual dictatorship of a Spanish court-painter, had no favour but for the Seguaci of Lo Spagnuoletto.

‘In such times of general distress and oppression, when few had the means or the spirit to build, and still fewer had lands to measure or property to transfer, it is little wonderful that the humble architect and landsurveyor of Renella,’ &c.

And so she gets down to the humble parentage of her hero; and after telling us that his father was chiefly anxious that he should not be an artist, and that both parents resolved to dedicate him to religion, she proceeds to record, that he gave little heed to his future vocation, but manifested various signs of a disposition for all the fine arts. This occasioned considerable uneasiness and opposition on the part of those who had destined him to something very different; and ‘the cord of paternal authority, drawn to its extreme tension, was naturally snapped.’—And upon this her volatile pen again takes its roving flight.

‘The truant Salvatoriello fled from the restraints of an uncongenial home, from Albert Le Grand and Santa Caterina di Sienna, and took shelter among those sites and scenes whose imagery soon became a part of his own intellectual existence, and were received as impressions long before they were studied as subjects. Sometimes he was discovered by the Padre Cercatore of the convent of Renella, among the rocks and caverns of Baiæ, the ruined temples of Gods, and the haunts of Sibyls. Sometimes he was found by a gossip of Madonna Giulia, in her pilgrimage to a “maesta,” sleeping among the wastes of the Solfatara, beneath the scorched branches of a blasted tree, his head pillowed by lava, and his dream most probably the vision of an infant poet’s slumbers. For even then he was

seeing Nature with a poet’s eye, and sketching her beauties with a painter’s hand.’ p. 45.

Now this is well imagined and quaintly expressed; it pleases the fair writer, and should offend nobody else. But we cannot say quite so much of the note which is appended to it, and couched in the following terms.

‘Rosa drew his first impressions from the magnificent scenery of Pausilippo and Vesuvius; Hogarth found his in a pot-house at Highgate, where a drunken quarrel and a broken nose “first woke the God within him.” Both, however, reached the sublime in their respective vocations—Hogarth in the grotesque, and Salvator in the majestic!’

Really these critics who have crossed the Alps do take liberties with the rest of the world,—and do not recover from a certain giddiness ever after. In the eagerness of partisanship, the fair author here falsifies the class to which these two painters belonged. Hogarth did not excel in the ‘grotesque,’ but in the ludicrous and natural,—nor Salvator in the ‘majestic,’ but in the wild and gloomy features of man or nature; and in talent Hogarth had the advantage—a million to one. It would not be too much to say, that he was probably the greatest observer of manners, and the greatest comic genius, that ever lived. We know no one, whether painter, poet, or prose-writer, not even Shakspeare, who, in his peculiar department, was so teeming with life and invention, so over-informed with matter, so ‘full to overflowing,’ as Hogarth was. We shall not attempt to calculate the quantity of pleasure and amusement his pictures have afforded, for it is quite incalculable. As to the distinction between ‘high and low’ in matters of genius, we shall leave it to her Ladyship’s other critics. But shall Hogarth’s world of truth and nature (his huge total farce of human life) be reduced to ‘a drunken quarrel and a broken nose?’ We will not retort this sneer by any insult to Salvator; he did not paint his pictures in opposition to Hogarth. There is an air about his landscapes sacred to our imaginations, though different from the close atmosphere of Hogarth’s scenes; and not the less so, because the latter could paint something better than ‘a broken nose.’ Nothing provokes us more than these exclusive and invidious comparisons, which seek to raise one man of genius by setting down another, and which suppose that there is nothing to admire in the greatest talents, unless they can be made a foil to bring out the weak points or nominal imperfections of some fancied rival.

We might transcribe, for the entertainment of the reader, the passage to which we have already referred, describing Salvator’s departure, in the company of his father, for the college of the Congregazione Somasco; but we prefer one which, though highly coloured and somewhat dramatic, is more to our purpose—the commencement of Salvator’s studies as an artist under his brother-in-law Francanzani. We cannot, however, do this at once: for, in endeavouring to lay our hands upon the passage, we were as usual intercepted by showers of roses and clouds of perfume. Lady Morgan’s style resembles ‘another morn risen on mid-noon.’ We must make a career therefore with the historian, and reach the temple of painting through the sounding portico of music. It appears that Salvator, after he left the brotherhood of the Somasco, with more poetry than logic in his head, devoted himself to music; and Lady Morgan preludes her narration with the following eloquent passage.

‘All Naples—(where even to this day love and melody make a part of the existence of the people)—all Naples was then resounding to guitars, lutes and harps, accompanying voices, which forever sang the fashionable canzoni of Cambio Donato, and of the Prince di Venusa.^[22] Neither German phlegm, nor Spanish gloom, could subdue spirits so tuned to harmony, nor silence the passionate serenatas which floated along the shores, and reverberated among the classic grottoes of Pausilippo. Vesuvius blazed, St. Elmo thundered from its heights, conspiracy brooded in the caves of Baiæ, and tyranny tortured its victim in the dungeons of the Castello Nuovo; yet still the ardent Neapolitans, amidst all the horrors of their social and political position,^[23] could snatch moments of blessed forgetfulness, and, reckless of their country’s woes and their own degradation, could give up hours to love and music, which were already numbered in the death-warrants of their tyrants.... It was at this moment, when peculiar circumstances were awakening in the region of the syrens “the hidden soul of harmony,” when the most beautiful women of the capital and the court gave a public exhibition of their talents and their charms, and glided in their feluccas on the moonlight midnight seas, with harps of gold and hands of snow, that the contumacious students of the Padri Somaschi escaped from the restraints of their cloisters, and the horrid howl of their laude spirituali, to all the intoxication of sound and sight, with every sense in full accordance with the musical passion of the day. It is little wonderful, if, at this epoch of his life, Salvator gave himself up unresistingly to the pursuit of a science, which he cultivated with ardour, even when time had preached his tumultuous pulse to rest; or if the floating capital of genius, which was as yet unappropriated, was in part applied to that species of composition, which, in the youth of man as of nations, precedes deeper and more important studies, and for which, in either, there is but one age. All poetry and passion, his young Muse “dallied with the innocence of love;” and inspired strains, which, though the simple breathings of an ardent temperament, the exuberance of youthful excitement, and an overteeming sensibility, were assigning him a place among the first Italian lyrists of his age. Little did he then dream that posterity would apply the rigid rules of criticism to the “idle visions” of his boyish fancy; or that his bars and basses would be conned and analyzed by the learned umpires of future ages—declared “not only admirable for a dilettante, but, in point of melody, superior to that of most of the masters of his time.”^[24]

‘It happened at this careless, gay, but not idle period of Salvator’s life, than an event occurred which hurried on his vocation to that art, to which his parents were so determined that he should not addict himself, but to which Nature had so powerfully directed him. His probation of adolescence was passed: his hour was come; and he was about to approach that temple whose threshold he modestly and poetically declared himself unworthy to pass.