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looked, on the whole, a most doleful figure,-" yes, if you please, Mr. Hodge."

"Vastly pretty! And what am I to have? I think I should like some Burgundy."

"Any thing," murmured the discomfited Squire; "only spare my-" "Tush! your life's in no danger. We'll take good care of it. And this most obliging English youth,-will your Honour offer him no refreshment? What is he to have?"

"Can he drink beer?" asked the Squire, in a faint voice, and averting his head as though the having to treat me was too much for him. "Can you drink beer?" echoed the Chaplain, looking at me, but shaking his head meanwhile, as if to warn me not to consent to partake of so cheap a beverage.

"It's very cheap," added Mr. Pinchin very plaintively. "It isn't a farthing a glass; and when you get used to it, it's better for the inwards than burnt brandy. Have a glass of beer, good youth. Kind Mr. Hodge, let them bring him a glass of Faro."

"Hang your faro! I don't like it," I said bluntly.

"What will you have, then?" asked the Squire, with a gasp of agony, and his head still buried in the chair-cushion.

It seemed that the chaplain's lips, as he looked at me, were mutely forming the letters W IN E. So I put a bold front upon it, and said, "Why, I should like, master, to drink your health in a bumper of right Burgundy with this good Gentleman here."

"He will have Burgundy," whimpered Mr. Pinchin, half to the chaircushion, and half to his periwig. "He will have Burgundy. The ragged, tall young man will have Burgundy at eight livres ten sols the flask. Oh, let him have it, and let me die! for he and the Parson have sworn to my Mamma to murder me and have my blood, and leave me among Smugglers, and Papistry, and Landlords who have sworn to ruin me in waxen candles."

There was something at once so ludicrous, and yet so Pathetic, in the little man's lamentations, that I scarcely knew whether to laugh or to cry. His feelings seemed so very acute, and he himself so perfectly sincere in his moanings and groanings, that it were almost Barbarity to jeer at him. The Chaplain, however, was, to all appearance, accustomed to these little Comedies; for, whispering to me that it was all Mr. Pinchin's manner, and that the young Gentleman meant no harm, he bade me bestir my self and hurry up the servants of the House to serve supper. So not only were the champagne and the Burgundy put on table,-and of the which there was put behind a screen a demiflask of the same true vintage for my own private drinking. ("And the Squire will be pleased, when he comes to Audit the score, to find that you have been content with Half a bottle. "Twill seem like something saved out of the Fire," whispers the Chaplain to me, as I helped to lay the cloth),-not only were Strong Waters and sweet Liquors and cordials provided, especially that renowned

stomachic the Maraschyno, of which the Hollanders and Flemings are so outrageously found, and which is made to such perfection in the Batavian settlements in Asia, but a substantial Repast likewise made its appearance, comprising Fowl, both wild and tame, and hot and cold, a mighty pasty of veal and eggs baked in a Standing Crust, some curious fresh sallets, and one of potatoes and salted herrings flavoured with garlic-to me most villanously nasty, but much affected in these amphibious Low Countries. So, the little Squire being brought to with a copious draught of champagne, and he was the most weazened little Bacchus I ever knew, moistening his ever-dry throttle from morn until night,-he and the chaplain sate down to supper, and remained feasting until long past midnight. So far as the Parson's part went, it might have been called a Carouse as well as a Feast, for his Reverence took his Liquor, and plenty of it, with a joviality of Contentment the which it would have done your Heart good to see, drinking "Church and King," and then "King and Church," so that neither Institution should have cause to grumble, and then giving the Army, the Navy, the Courts of Quarter Sessions throughout England, Newmarket and the horses, not forgetting the Jockeys, the pious memory of Dr. Sacheverell, at which the Squire winced somewhat, for he was a bitter Whig, with many other elegant and appropriate sentiments. In fact, it was easy to see that his reverence had known the very best of company, and when at one of the clock he called for a Bowl of Punch, which he had taught the Woman of the House very well how to brew, I put him down as one who had sate with Lords,―aye and of the Council too, over their Potations. But the Behaviour of Bartholomew Pinchin, Esquire, was, from the beginning unto the end of the Regale, of a piece with his former extraordinary and Grotesque conduct. After the champagne, he essayed to sing a song to the tune of "Cold and Raw," but, failing therein, he began to cry. Then did he accuse me of having secreted the Liver Wing of a Capon, which, I declare, I had seen him devour not Five Minutes before. Then he had more Drink, and proposed successively as Toasts his Cousin Lady Betty Heeltap, daughter to my Lord Poddle; a certain Madame Van Foorst, who I afterwards discovered to be the keeper of a dancing Ridotto on the Port at Antwerp; then the Jungfrau, or serving wench, that waited upon us, who had for name Babette; and lastly his Mamma, whom, ten minutes afterwards, he began to load with Abuse, declaring that she wished to have her Barty shut up in a madhouse, in order that she might enjoy his Lands and Revenues. And then he fell to computing the cost of the supper, swearing that it would Ruin him, and making his old complaints about those eternal wax candles. Then, espying me out, he asks who I am, challenges me to fight with him for a Crown, vows that he will delate me to the English Resident at Brussels for a Jacobite spy, tells me that I am an Honest Fellow, and, next to Mr. Hodge, the best friend he ever had in the world, and falls down at last stupefied. Whereupon, with the assistance of the Flemish Drawer, I carried my new master up to bed.

VOL. V.

Y

English Art from a French Point of View.

BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER.

TRANSLATED (WITH A FEW EXPLANATORY NOTES) BY THE EDITOR.

I.

[Ir gives me very great pleasure to introduce THEOPHILE GAUTIER to the readers of Temple Bar, and it has been a labour of love to translate into English the remarks he has written upon the pictures of the British School in our International Exhibition. As for the introduction, it is merely a formal one, and nearly as supererogatory as the ceremonial "Mr. So-and-so, Mr. Such-a-one; Mr. Such-a-one, Mr. So-and-so,” nervously performed, for the comfort of two people who have virtually known and esteemed each other for a very long period, by a third "party :"-a word which must, I suppose, be considered classical, since it was used by a high personage at the Royal Academy dinner. The name of Théophile Gautier must indeed be familiar to, and his talents appreciated by, the majority of those whom I address. For the benefit of the few who have not studied his works, I may say that his poem of the Reine Candaule placed him, years ago, on the steps of that throne whose summit is occupied by VICTOR HUGO; that his graphic and brilliant volumes of travels in Spain and Turkey are equal to any thing our Borrows, Kinglakes, or Stanleys have written; and that as a Critic on Art-catholic, acute, impartial, and discriminative-he has very few equals, even among a nation of critics, and is known, admired, and feared (as critics should be) in every gallery in Europe. But there is no need for me to puff a man whose trumpet Fame has been sounding any time these five-andtwenty years. I won't even say any thing about the introduction to Mademoiselle de Maupin, declared to be "the magnificent preface to a magnificent book" by HONORÉ DE BALZAC, who loved Théophile Gautier, and declared him to be one of the Three Men in France who could speak good French. The other two were Hugo and himself. Monsieur Gautier has been good enough to allow me to publish an English version of his Exhibition feuilletons from the Moniteur, and to add such little commentaries as I thought proper. This is the first instalment; but, from the concluding paragraph, the reader will be enabled to judge of the additional interest which the continuation of his criticisms is likely to afford.-G. A. S.]

In our review of the Fine Arts in the International Exhibition, the English school first claims our attention. This does not necessarily imply any idea of conceding precedence to this school over that of any other nation; but we give it the first place for the reason that the British school is, among foreigners, the least known, and that, previous to the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855, which virtually first revealed its existence to the Continent, scarcely any thought had been bestowed on the number, the talent, or the importance, of the artists whom that school comprised. The labours of favourite English painters command prices which are unattainable abroad. Their pictures seldom leave England, and are

rarely to be met with out of the old manor-houses, galleries, or private cabinets which they are destined to adorn. In foreign galleries the most vaunted for the completeness of their contents, English paintings are scarcely ever met with; in the collections of amateurs they are almost wholly lacking; and, without undertaking a journey to England, it would have been impossible, until very recently, to form any thing like a due estimate of their merit. It may be asked, whence this unjust oblivion and this disdainful ignorance have arisen. It is difficult to find a rational explanation, unless, indeed, we take into account a prejudice long established, and which even the English themselves have not been disinclined to cherish (being a people who regard their own faults with much complacency), viz. that they have, naturally and nationally, no kind of aptitude for the Fine Arts. "Excudant alii spirantia mollius era:" it is thus that they would seem to console themselves for an impotence of partial extent by the remembrance of the magnificent promise given at the conclusion of the passage we have quoted. Indeed, art in England can scarcely be regarded as a plant indigenous to her soil, but rather as a lately-imported and carefully-cultivated exotic.

Holbein, Vandyck, and Lely came to this country with talents already matured, with nothing to learn from, and every thing to teach to, their hosts. They became the fashion, but they founded no school. They were respectfully admired, extensively patronised, and recompensed with splendid generosity. Their masterpieces were preserved with zealous care by amateurs who did not venture to imitate them, regarding them as the almost preternatural fruits of an exceptional organisation, to which no analogy could be found in England. Even as the Romans summoned artists from Greece, so did the English seek on the Continent for the painters or sculptors they required. It was only in the last century that, gradually gaining courage, they themselves grasped the palette and the brush; and they began to paint, and to paint well, just as Continental art, after running the gauntlet of almost every phase of development, had reached that condition of over-culture which borders on decay. British art has never known the adorable prattling and lisping utterance of primitive epochs, nor that delicious uncertainty of the infant's hand, at once charmed and terrified by its first efforts. It never knew even youth, even adolescence. It came into the world grave, self-assured, and mature, — gifted, as though by long prescience, with the experience and the capability for producing results which, properly, only belong to middle-age. One word will suffice to mark this salient and peculiar characteristic of English art, when we say that William Hogarth may be considered the English Giotto.

If there ever existed a painter absolutely original, that painter is Hogarth. Conflicting as may be the various estimates of his genius, the quality of originality cannot be denied to him. It is in vain that we seek in his work for noble reminiscences of antique form, for the slightest reflex of the touch of the great Italian masters; nor even-and this is matter

for astonishment-for any marked similarity with the works of the Dutch and Flemish painters, who, by the homeliness of their subjects, and the realism of their execution, seemed to have been the earliest professors of the Hogarthian creed. It may almost be said that, in like manner as the child Blaise Pascal invented mathematics without any study of books, so did Hogarth invent painting without any study of pictures;-invented it by the intrinsic strength of his genius; in no way seduced, in no way inspired, by the charms of pure outline, or of the luminous play of colour which Nature offers to the observant, but simply guided by a philosophical temperament, and the desire to give a pictorial form and plastic vesture to certain innate conceptions, which might have been as forcibly written as they were forcibly painted. Drawing and colour are in Hogarth's eyes only so many means and appliances of a secondary nature; he is always preoccupied by the idea to be explained, and he seldom seeks for either beauty, or grace, or even for what is simply pleasing. This logical austerity, this stern disinterestedness of Art for Art's own sake, this pursuit of the characteristic at the expense of the beautiful, concur in giving to this painter profound originality. Man, physically considered, is almost a nonenity to Hogarth. The moral man is every thing. Nature is vanquished by society. To show the vagaries of every human passion, to drag forth every absurdity, to scourge every vice after having paraded it through every phase of degradation,—such was the goal to which the steps of the painter-moralist ever and persistently tended; no caprice of the palette, no whim of the brush, ever made him swerve from his course. Every thing in his pictures shows significance, observation, volition. The slightest detail has its meaning. The clock, the chair, the table, are as those which should and must be there, and not any where else, and which would be wholly out of place to furnish another room withal. His figures are all typical. The features, purposely exaggerated in expression perhaps, are not, however, to be mistaken. Occasionally they may be caricatured, ruddled, as it were, just as are the faces of actors on the stage; and it might almost be assumed that certain works of Hogarth had been painted less from nature than from some capital comedy performed by first-rate actors, so scientific is the arrangement of the stage (mise en scène), and so dexterously is every thing calculated from a theatrical point of view. If Hogarth cares little for form, as the Greeks understood that form in its abstract purity, he nevertheless excels in expression and in facial mimicry. The gestures of his characters are essentially true to human emotion; they betray movements that have the deepest seat; they flash from the brain under the impulse of a predetermined sentiment: Hogarth disdains to bring them into combination for the mere sake of so many angles, so many curves, so many points of contrast, or so many alternations of lines. They are there, and they must be drawn. So much the worse for the countenance of a man or a woman is it if Hogarth finds it degraded by vice, convulsed by passion, disfigured by ugliness or positive deformity. Hogarth

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