chairs for guests, beaux bowing in
the doorway or whispering tender nothings at a beauty's ear, old men
reclining in arm-chairs, embroiderers at work, muffs, copper
water-buckets, nurses with babies in their arms, silver plate of all
descriptions:--such is the farrago of this multiform and graceful, but
limited, series of transcripts from the world of visible objects. It is
clear that Longhi thought "the proper study of mankind is man;" and man
as a clothed, sociable, well-behaved animal.

His sketches are remarkable for their strenuous sincerity--their search
after the right attitude, their serious effort to hit the precise line
wanted, their suggested movement and seizure of life in the superficies.
They have a sustained air of good-breeding, refined intelligence, and
genial sympathy with the prose of human nature. Landscape might never
have existed so far as Longhi was concerned. I do not think that a tree,
a cloud, or even a flower will be found among the miscellaneous objects
he so carefully studied and drew so deftly. The world he moved in was
the world of men and women meeting on the surface-paths of daily
intercourse. Even here, we do not detect the slightest interest in
passionate or painful aspects of experience. All Longhi's people are
well-to-do and placid in their different degrees. The peasants in the
taverns do not brawl, nor the fine gentlemen fight duels, nor the lovers
in the drawing-rooms quarrel. He seems to have overlooked beggary,
disease, and every form of vice or suffering. He does not care for
animals. With the exception of a parrot, a caged canary, and a stiffly
drawn riding-horse, the brute creation is not represented in these
sketches. No sarcasm, no grossness, no violence of any kind, disturbs
the calm artistic seriousness, the sweet painstaking curiosity of his
mental mood. The execution throughout is less robust than sensitively
delicate. We feel a something French, a suggestion of Watteau's elysium
of fashion, in his touch on things. In fine, the sketch-book
corroborates the impression made on us by Longhi's finished pictures.

IX.

With all his limitations of character and artistic scope, Longi remains
a very interesting and highly respectable painter. In an age of social
corruption he remained free from impurity, and depicted only what was
blameless and of good repute. We cannot study his work without surmising
that manners in Italy were more refined than in our own country at that