ys to do a sporting piece.'--So I told the poor man that I would
willingly give him advice, but I was afraid it would ruin him
completely, for that afterwards he would have to take two or three
months.--'Yes, Sir, I sees that; but I am too old now to learn a new
line. But I find trees very hard; I can't manage them.'--So I sat down,
and drew a branch of a tree, which he said was very much in his style;
and I gave him some advice which I thought might help him, and the good
man went away so much obliged."

When the news of Mr. Seddon's death reached England, it was at once felt
by his friends that it was due to his memory that the public should be
made better acquainted with the excellence of his works. An exhibition
of them was accordingly made, and a subscription raised for the benefit
of his widow, by purchasing his large picture of Jerusalem, to be
presented to the National Gallery. The subscription was successful, and
Seddon's fame is secure.

"Mr. Seddon's works," says Mr. Ruskin, "are the first which represent
a truly historic landscape Art; that is to say, they are the first
landscapes uniting perfect artistical skill with topographical
accuracy,--being directed with stern self-restraint to no other purpose
than that of giving to persons who cannot travel trustworthy knowledge
of the scenes which ought to be most interesting to them. Whatever
degrees of truth may have been attempted or attained by previous artists
have been more or less subordinate to pictorial or dramatic effect. In
Mr. Seddon's works, the primal object is to place the spectator, as far
as Art can do, in the scene represented, and to give him the perfect
sensation of its reality, wholly unmodified by the artist's execution."

Mr. Ruskin's judgment will not be questioned by those who have seen
Seddon's pictures. But it might also be added, that such accuracy as he
attained is by no means the result of mere laborious and conscientious
copying, but implies and requires the possession of strong and
well-balanced imagination.

We trust that the extracts we have given may lead lovers of Art to read
the whole of the little volume from which they are taken.

_Passages from my Autobiography_. By SYDNEY, LADY MORGAN. New York: D.
Appleton & Co. 1859.

Aged sportiveness is not seductive, and we do not become slaves at the
tap of a fan, when the hand that holds it is palsied and withered. We
have in the volume before us the melancholy spectacle of a