rieties of genius do they each
foreshadow and embalm! Even when no special beauty or skill is manifest,
the character of features transmitted by pictorial art, their antiquity
or historical significance, often lends a mystery and meaning to the
effigies of humanity. In the carved faces of old German church choirs
and altars, the existent facial peculiarities of race are curiously
evident; a Grecian life breathes from many a profile in the Elgin
marbles, and a sacred marvel invests the exhumed giants of Nineveh; in
the cartoons of Raphael, and the old Gobelin tapestries, are hints
of what is essential in the progress and the triumphs of painting.
Considered as a language, how definitely is the style of painters
associated with special forms of character and spheres of life! It is
this variety of human experience typified and illustrated on canvas,
that forms our chief obligations to the artist; through him our
perception of and acquaintance with our race, its individuality and
career, its phases and aspects, is indefinitely enlarged. "The greatest
benefit," says a late writer, "we owe to the artist, whether painter,
poet, or novelist, is the _extension of our sympathies_. Art is the
nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying our experience and
extending our contact with our fellow-creatures beyond the bounds of our
personal lot."

The effect of a picture is increased by isolation and surprise. I never
realized the physiognomical traits of Madame de Maintenon, until
her portrait was encountered in a solitary country-house, of whose
drawing-room it was the sole ornament; and the romance of a miniature by
Malbone first came home to me, when an ancient dame, in the costume of
the last century, with trembling fingers drew one of her husband from
an antique cabinet, and descanted on the manly beauty of the deceased
original, and the graceful genius of the young and lamented artist.
Hazlitt wrote an ingenious essay on "A Portrait by Vandyck," which gives
us an adequate idea of what such a masterpiece is to the eye and mind
of genuine artistic perception and sympathy. Few sensations, or rather
sentiments, are more inextricably made up of pleasure and sadness than
that with which we contemplate (as is not infrequent in some old gallery
of Europe) a portrait which deeply interests or powerfully attracts
us, and whose history is irrevocably lost. A better homily on the
evanescence of human love and fame can scarcely be imagi