oached with reverence, if every picture, every statue,
were removed from them, of which the subject was either the vice or the
misery of mankind, portrayed without any moral purpose: consider the
innumerable groups having reference merely to various forms of passion,
low or high; drunken revels and brawls among peasants, gambling or
fighting scenes among soldiers, amours and intrigues among every class,
brutal battle pieces, banditti subjects, gluts of torture and death in
famine, wreck, or slaughter, for the sake merely of the
excitement,--that quickening and suppling of the dull spirit that cannot
be gained for it but by bathing it in blood, afterward to wither back
into stained and stiffened apathy; and then that whole vast false heaven
of sensual passion, full of nymphs, satyrs, graces, goddesses, and I
know not what, from its high seventh circle in Correggio's Antiope, down
to the Grecized ballet-dancers and smirking Cupids of the Parisian
upholsterer. Sweep away all this, remorselessly, and see how much art we
should have left.

Sec. LX. And yet these are only the grossest manifestations of the
tendency of the school. There are subtler, yet not less certain, signs of
it in the works of men who stand high in the world's list of sacred
painters. I doubt not that the reader was surprised when I named Murillo
among the men of this third rank. Yet, go into the Dulwich Gallery, and
meditate for a little over that much celebrated picture of the two beggar
boys, one eating lying on the ground, the other standing beside him. We
have among our own painters one who cannot indeed be set beside Murillo as
a painter of Madonnas, for he is a pure Naturalist, and, never having seen
a Madonna, does not paint any; but who, as a painter of beggar or
peasant boys, may be set beside Murillo, or any one else,--W. Hunt. He
loves peasant boys, because he finds them more roughly and picturesquely
dressed, and more healthily colored, than others. And he paints all
that he sees in them fearlessly; all the health and humor, and
freshness, and vitality, together with such awkwardness and stupidity,
and what else of negative or positive harm there may be in the creature;
but yet so that on the whole we love it, and find it perhaps even
beautiful, or if not, at least we see that there is capability of good
in it, rather than of evil; and all is lighted up by a sunshine and
sweet color that makes the smock-frock as precious as cloth of gold. But