pouting, sham sublime, that our teachers
have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble
servant and other antihumbuggists should heartily, according to the
strength that is in them, endeavor to pull down. What, for instance,
could Monsieur Lafond care about the death of Eudamidas? What was Hecuba
to Chevalier Drolling, or Chevalier Drolling to Hecuba? I would lay a
wager that neither of them ever conjugated [Greek text omitted], and
that their school learning carried them not as far as the letter, but
only to the game of taw. How were they to be inspired by such subjects?
From having seen Talma and Mademoiselle Georges flaunting in sham Greek
costumes, and having read up the articles Eudamidas, Hecuba, in the
"Mythological Dictionary." What a classicism, inspired by rouge,
gas-lamps, and a few lines in Lempriere, and copied, half from ancient
statues, and half from a naked guardsman at one shilling and sixpence
the hour!

Delacroix is a man of a very different genius, and his "Medea" is
a genuine creation of a noble fancy. For most of the others, Mrs.
Brownrigg, and her two female 'prentices, would have done as well as
the desperate Colchian with her [Greek text omitted]. M. Delacroix has
produced a number of rude, barbarous pictures; but there is the stamp of
genius on all of them,--the great poetical INTENTION, which is worth all
your execution. Delaroche is another man of high merit; with not such a
great HEART, perhaps, as the other, but a fine and careful draughtsman,
and an excellent arranger of his subject. "The Death of Elizabeth" is a
raw young performance seemingly--not, at least, to my taste. The "Enfans
d'Edouard" is renowned over Europe, and has appeared in a hundred
different ways in print. It is properly pathetic and gloomy, and merits
fully its high reputation. This painter rejoices in such subjects--in
what Lord Portsmouth used to call "black jobs." He has killed Charles
I. and Lady Jane Grey, and the Dukes of Guise, and I don't know whom
besides. He is, at present, occupied with a vast work at the Beaux
Arts, where the writer of this had the honor of seeing him,--a little,
keen-looking man, some five feet in height. He wore, on this important
occasion, a bandanna round his head, and was in the act of smoking a
cigar.

Horace Vernet, whose beautiful daughter Delaroche married, is the king
of French battle-painters--an amazingly rapid and dexterous draughtsman,
who has Napoleon and