orinne to Oswald, "St Peter's for
the first time, when the brilliancy of its decorations might appear in
full splendour, in the rays of the sun: I reserve for you a finer, and a
more profound enjoyment, to behold it by the light of the moon." Perhaps
there is a distinction of the same kind between the gaudy brilliancy of
varied colours, and the chaster simplicity of uniform shadows; and it is
probably for this reason, that on the first view of a picture which you
have long admired in the simplicity of engraved effect, you
involuntarily recede from the view, and seek in the obscure light and
uncertain tint which distance produces, to recover that uniform tone and
general character, which the splendour of colouring is so apt to
destroy. It is a feeling similar to that which Lord Byron has so finely
described, as arising from the beauty of moonlight scenery:--

------"Mellow'd to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies."

The Dutch and Flemish school, to which you next advance, possesses
merit, and is distinguished by a character of a very different
description. It was the well-known object of this school, to present an
exact and faithful _imitation of nature_; to exaggerate none of its
faults, and enhance none of its excellencies, but exhibit it as it
really appears to the eye of an ordinary spectator. Its artists
selected, in general, some scene of humour or amusement, in the
discovery of which, the most ignorant spectators might discover other
sources of pleasure than those which the merit of the art itself
afforded. They did not pretend, in general, to aim at the exhibition of
passion or powerful emotion: their paintings, therefore, are free from
that painful display of theatrical effect, which characterises the
French school; their object was not to represent those deep scenes of
sorrow or suffering, which accord with the profound feelings which it
was the object of the Italian school to awaken; they want, therefore,
the dignity and grandeur which the works of the greater Italian
painters possess: their merit consists in the faithful delineation of
those ordinary scenes and common occurrences, which are familiar to the
eye of the most careless observer. The power of the painter, therefore,
could be displayed only in the minuteness of the finishing, or the
brilliancy of the effect; and he endeavoured, by the powerful contrast
of light and shade, to give an higher character to his works, than the
na