ape, even though it
should be all very _natural_. Painting has been called the handmaid of
nature; is it not the duty of a handmaid to array her mistress to the
best possible advantage? At least to keep her infirmities from view
and not to expose her too undressed?

But I am not so weak, so cowardly, so fastidious, as to shrink from
every representation of human suffering, provided that our sympathy be
not strained beyond a certain point. To _please_ is the genuine aim of
painting, as of all the fine arts; when pleasure is conveyed through
deeply excited interest, by affecting the passions, the senses, and
the imagination, painting assumes a higher character, and almost vies
with tragedy: in fact, it _is_ tragedy to the eye, and is amenable to
the same laws. The St. Sebastians of Guido and Razzi; the St. Jerome
of Domenichino; the sternly beautiful Judith of Allori; the Pieta of
Raffaelle; the San Pietro Martire of Titian; are all so many tragic
_scenes_ wherein whatever is revolting in circumstances or character
is judiciously kept from view, where human suffering is dignified by
the moral lesson it is made to convey, and its effect on the beholder
at once softened and heightened by the redeeming grace which genius
and poetry have shed like a glory round it.

Allowing all this, I am yet obliged to confess that I am wearied with
this class, of pictures, and that I wish there were fewer of them.

But there is one subject which never tires, at least never tires _me_,
however varied, repeated, multiplied. A subject so lovely in itself
that the most eminent painter cannot easily embellish it, or the
meanest degrade it; a subject which comes home to our own bosoms and
dearest feelings; and in which we may "lose ourselves in all
delightfulness," and indulge unreproved pleasure. I mean the _Virgin
and Child_, or in other words, the abstract personification of what is
loveliest, purest, and dearest, under heaven--maternal tenderness,
virgin meekness, and childish innocence, and the _beauty of holiness_
over all.

It occurred to me to-day, that if a gallery could be formed of this
subject alone, selecting one specimen from among the works of every
painter, it would form not only a comparative index to their different
styles, but we should find, on recurring to what is known of the lives
and characters of the great masters, that each has stamped some
peculiarity of his own disposition on his Virgins; and that, after a
little