ltogether a
delusion.

For the first time in her life, Hilda now grew acquainted with that
icy demon of weariness, who haunts great picture galleries. He is
a plausible Mephistopheles, and possesses the magic that is the
destruction of all other magic. He annihilates color, warmth, and, more
especially, sentiment and passion, at a touch. If he spare anything, it
will be some such matter as an earthen pipkin, or a bunch of herrings by
Teniers; a brass kettle, in which you can see your rice, by Gerard Douw;
a furred robe, or the silken texture of a mantle, or a straw hat, by Van
Mieris; or a long-stalked wineglass, transparent and full of shifting
reflection, or a bit of bread and cheese, or an over-ripe peach with
a fly upon it, truer than reality itself, by the school of Dutch
conjurers. These men, and a few Flemings, whispers the wicked demon,
were the only painters. The mighty Italian masters, as you deem them,
were not human, nor addressed their work to human sympathies, but to
a false intellectual taste, which they themselves were the first to
create. Well might they call their doings "art," for they substituted
art instead of nature. Their fashion is past, and ought, indeed, to have
died and been buried along with them.

Then there is such a terrible lack of variety in their subjects. The
churchmen, their great patrons, suggested most of their themes, and
a dead mythology the rest. A quarter part, probably, of any large
collection of pictures consists of Virgins and infant Christs, repeated
over and over again in pretty much an identical spirit, and generally
with no more mixture of the Divine than just enough to spoil them as
representations of maternity and childhood, with which everybody's heart
might have something to do. Half of the other pictures are Magdalens,
Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, Pietas,
Noli-me-tangeres, or the Sacrifice of Abraham, or martyrdoms of saints,
originally painted as altar-pieces, or for the shrines of chapels, and
woefully lacking the accompaniments which the artist haft in view.

The remainder of the gallery comprises mythological subjects, such as
nude Venuses, Ledas, Graces, and, in short, a general apotheosis of
nudity, once fresh and rosy perhaps, but yellow and dingy in our day,
and retaining only a traditionary charm. These impure pictures are from
the same illustrious and impious hands that adventured to call before
us the august forms of Apo