e doom
Preserved not, when the sleep was Nature's tomb.

H.

* * * * *

FINE ARTS

(_For the Mirror_.)

* * * * *

"The way to be an excellent painter is to be an
excellent man--and these united, make a character
that would shine even in a better world
than this."--JONATHAN RICHARDSON.

The sister arts of _Painting and Engraving_ have been making great
progress in England for some time past, and we are disposed to think
this a subject of congratulation and importance to all classes of the
community.

The literature of the Fine Arts is likewise becoming more and more
popular every day. They form a prominent feature in every new literary
project, and not unfrequently literature, to use a hackneyed phrase,
is made their vehicle--like the namby-pamby of an English opera
for the strains of Rossini or Weber. The public are contented with
excellence in one department and mediocrity in the other; they cannot
be constantly admiring--that is out of the question--and it is
probably on this account that much of what appears _below par_ is
tolerated and even encouraged.

We will not go the length of assenting to the proposal of converting
Sir Joshua Reynolds's Lectures into Sermons, by the mere alteration of
the terms of art into scriptural phraseology; but we venture to assert
that much national good is likely to result from these advances of
art, and its constant introduction into all our amusements. That it
promotes the growth of virtue is too old an axiom to be refuted:

----Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.

"The Italians commonly call a taste for the fine arts, or skill in
them, by the name of Virtue. They term the productions of artists
objects of virtue; and a person who has a taste for such things is
denominated _a virtuoso_, that is, a virtuous man." Such is the
language of the _Edinburgh Review_, in commencing an article on a
recently-published translation of Lanzi's _History of Painting in
Italy_, in six octavo volumes--and what a delightful relief is this
from the party declamations which usually occupy so large a portion of
that "critical journal." But this is not singular, for it is now no
uncommon thing to see a large letter column of a newspaper, and a
similar proportion of a printed sheet published at twopence, alike
occupied by "the Fine Arts."

Patronage, royal and noble