In the next year, another fête owed its éclat to the talents of the Dame Lebrun; but the object of it was no longer the Pindaric poet, but the subcollector of taxes. But as it was impossible to keep the Sieur Lebrun entirely away from any of the haunts of the Muses, he was enlisted in the corps of subject personages, and performed the Co-too to the Sieur Grimod in the character of a satyr! And this was the more in keeping, as the scene was a wood, and the hero of the entertainment enacted the part of a sort of Orson, under the name of Sylvanus. In 1772, the gaieties of the Dame Lebrun suffered no abatement, except from an attack of illness; and, for the recovery of her health, she spent the greater portion of the year at the country-house of the Sieur Grimodsometimes with her husband, says the Mémoire, and sometimes without. The following spring was passed, as usual, in balls and masquerades. The house of the Sieur Grimod was again the scene of a splendid entertainment; but, on this occasion, the object of the fête was neither the Sieur Bacchus, nor the Sieur Sylvain, but Madame Lebrun herself. The indefatigable Bacchus, however, if not the principal personage of the day, was the chief performer. There was a procession in boats. The Sieur Lebrun did the honours of the enchanted island to his wife. Dressed as a sailor, he conducted her, disguised as Flora, in an ornamented barge, all festooned with garlands, and illuminated with coloured lamps. It was a truly fairy scene, and the Dame Lebrun did not at that time look on the composer of the spectacle as a malignant cobold, the enemy of her repose.

In January 1774, she wrote letters to her husband as full of gaiety, and as expressive of affection, as any of the others; and on the 5th of March she sued for a separate maintenance! Such is the history, contained in a lawyer's brief, of fourteen years of the wedded life of a French family of the middle rank, or rather below it. And from incidents contained in the account, we perceive that this actual labour of enjoyment, these balls, and fêtes, and entertainments of all kinds, were the usual mode of life of most of the people they associated with.

Imagine the same scenes going on in England;-women, after thirteen or fourteen years of marriage, going dressed up as heathen goddesses in boats, and being attended round enchanted isles by Bacchuses and Orsons, dressed in shaggy skins, and chanting doggerel till echo was dead beat! Bacchus, a secretary, at a salary of a hundred a-year-Örson, a sub-collector of taxes! But more than all-let us think that the fault of the Sieur Lebrun does not seem to have consisted, in the eyes of his mother and sister, in allowing the intimacy between his wife and the friends, but in putting a stop to it. When such things are the fashion in England, let us prepare for the National Convention.

The demand of the Sieur Lebrun for restitution of conjugal rights, was rejected; he appealed against the decision, wrote bitter epigrams on the judges, and celebrated his wife in some elegies worthy of Tibullus, under the name of Fanny. From court to court he carried his cause, his epigrams, and his elegies; till finally, in 1781, the Parliament decided against him, and the Dame Lebrun was freed for ever from the matrimonial claim, and the little suppers beside the garret fire. But not for ever was Grimod free from the vengeance of the virtuous Lebrun. And not for the last time was heard the shrill voice of the complaining husband by the fastidious ears of Fanny. A few years passed on-Louis the Sixteenth was hurried to the scaffold-the golden locks of Marie Antoinette were defiled with the blood and sawdust, which Young France regarded as the most acceptable offering to the goddess of liberty; and who is that sharpfeatured little man, sitting in the front row of the spectators of those heavendarkening murders, with a red cap on his head, and a many-stringed harp in his hand, chanting the praises of the murderers, and exciting the drunken populace to greater horrors? Lebrun. Yes, the French Pindar is appointed poet-laureate to the guillotine, and has apartments assigned him at the national cost in the Louvre. Whenever an atrocity is to be committed, an ode is published, "by order of authority," to raise the passions of

the people to the proper pitch. When the atrocity is over, another ode is ordered to celebrate the performers, and congratulate the people on their triumph. When Grimod was brought before the Convention as one of the oppressors of the people, and parasites of the aristocracy-a woman, old and trembling, was leaning on his armhis personal crimes, if any, were so little known, that he was on the point of being dismissed from the bar for want of an accuser. Pindar, in his red cap, with his many-stringed harp in his hand, was there; and all Helicon glowed like molten lead in his vindictive heart when he looked at the miserable pair. "What sentence shall we pass on the person called Grimod, ci-devant sub-collector of taxes, and the woman beside him, who has aided and abetted him in several attempts to escape from the censorship of the Committee of Public Safety?" The accused looked timidly round, in hopes that no answer would be returned to this routine enquiry, in which case their safety would have been assured; but red-capped Pindar

struck his hand hurriedly over the chords, and cried, in the shrill sharp tones, that both the prisoners remembered too well, "A la mort à la mort!" and in ten minutes their bodies were lying headless, side by side, amidst the hootings and howlings of ten thousand demons, exemplifying to astonished Europe the perfection of civilization and philanthropy. Little more needs to be said of the Sieur Lebrun. He lived through the dangers of the Revolution; wrote odes and satires indiscriminately on friend and foe; worshipped power to the last, and was the sycophant, and would have been the murderer, of Napoleon, as he had been of Louis and Robespierre; and died at last in receipt of a pension from the state, member (like Lord Brougham) of the National Institute of France; and had his panegyric pronounced on him by his successor, as if he had united the virtues of Aristides to the genius of Homer. Whereas, we take him to have been the true type of the Frenchman of his time-a monkey, till he got the taste of blood, and then a tiger.

So long ago as 1839, in the June number of this Magazine, we noticed M. Merimée's posthumous work on oil-painting. It was ushered into the world with no little parade, under the sanction and strong recommendation of a committee of the Royal Institute of France; and in this country with the somewhat authoritative and permitted dedication to the President of our Royal Academy, by the editor and translator, Mr Sarsfield Taylor. We should have cared little about reviewing such a work, had we not felt persuaded that the public, and more especially artists, required some caution, under the high influence of the mode of its publication, how they should receive a work whose direct tendency was to misguide them-to mislead them from the path towards the practice of the old masters, and to confirm artists in the evil practice

of mixing varnish with the oils with which their pigments are ground.

The work was the more insidious, as it professed to take the excellence of the old masters as the attainable object. We believe that we satisfactorily showed that M. Merimée was so predisposed in favour of copal varnish, that in his researches he would make every thing bend, even the most stubborn facts, and most opposing sense of passages quoted by him, to that prejudice. We exposed the numerous, we had almost said wilful, mistranslations from the Latin and Italian-especially the former-with which the volume abounded. We showed how entirely and frequently original passages had been distorted from their plain meaning, as if with a systematic purpose, to uphold a fanciful theory. We offer a specimen :The monk Theophilus, who wrote in the tenth century "De Arte Pingen

In the next year, another fête owed its éclat to the talents of the Dame Lebrun; but the object of it was no longer the Pindaric poet, but the subcollector of taxes. But as it was impossible to keep the Sieur Lebrun entirely away from any of the haunts of the Muses, he was enlisted in the corps of subject personages, and performed the Co-too to the Sieur Grimod in the character of a satyr! And this was the more in keeping, as the scene was a wood, and the hero of the entertainment enacted the part of a sort of Orson, under the name of Sylvanus. In 1772, the gaieties of the Dame Lebrun suffered no abatement, except from an attack of illness; and, for the recovery of her health, she spent the greater portion of the year at the country-house of the Sieur Grimodsometimes with her husband, says the Mémoire, and sometimes without. The following spring was passed, as usual, in balls and masquerades. The house of the Sieur Grimod was again the scene of a splendid entertainment; but, on this occasion, the object of the fête was neither the Sieur Bacchus, nor the Sieur Sylvain, but Madame Lebrun herself. The indefatigable Bacchus, however, if not the principal personage of the day, was the chief performer. There was a procession in boats. The Sieur Lebrun did the honours of the enchanted island to his wife. Dressed as a sailor, he conducted her, disguised as Flora, in an ornamented barge, all festooned with garlands, and illuminated with coloured lamps. It was a truly fairy scene, and the Dame Lebrun did not at that time look on the composer of the spectacle as a malignant cobold, the enemy of her repose.

In January 1774, she wrote letters to her husband as full of gaiety, and as expressive of affection, as any of the others; and on the 5th of March she sued for a separate maintenance! Such is the history, contained in a lawyer's brief, of fourteen years of the wedded life of a French family of the middle rank, or rather below it. And from incidents contained in the account, we perceive that this actual labour of enjoyment, these balls, and fêtes, and entertainments of all kinds, were the usual mode of life of most of the people they associated with.

Imagine the same scenes going on in England;-women, after thirteen or fourteen years of marriage, going dressed up as heathen goddesses in boats, and being attended round enchanted isles by Bacchuses and Orsons, dressed in shaggy skins, and chanting doggerel till echo was dead beat! Bacchus, a secretary, at a salary of a hundred a-year-Örson, a sub-collector of taxes! But more than all-let us think that the fault of the Sieur Lebrun does not seem to have consisted, in the eyes of his mother and sister, in allowing the intimacy between his wife and the friends, but in putting a stop to it. When such things are the fashion in England, let us prepare for the National Convention.

The demand of the Sieur Lebrun for restitution of conjugal rights, was rejected; he appealed against the decision, wrote bitter epigrams on the judges, and celebrated his wife in some elegies worthy of Tibullus, under the name of Fanny. From court to court he carried his cause, his epigrams, and his elegies; till finally, in 1781, the Parliament decided against him, and the Dame Lebrun was freed for ever from the matrimonial claim, and the little suppers beside the garret fire. But not for ever was Grimod free from the vengeance of the virtuous Lebrun. And not for the last time was heard the shrill voice of the complaining husband by the fastidious ears of Fanny. A few years passed on-Louis the Sixteenth was hurried to the scaffold-the golden locks of Marie Antoinette were defiled with the blood and sawdust, which Young France regarded as the most acceptable offering to the goddess of liberty; and who is that sharpfeatured little man, sitting in the front row of the spectators of those heavendarkening murders, with a red cap on his head, and a many-stringed harp in his hand, chanting the praises of the murderers, and exciting the drunken populace to greater horrors? Lebrun. Yes, the French Pindar is appointed poet-laureate to the guillotine, and has apartments assigned him at the national cost in the Louvre. Whenever an atrocity is to be committed, an ode is published, "by order of authority," to raise the passions of

which he delivers are therefore those acquired in immediate succession from that great first master, and as the secrets of his art. We grieve to add that the work was written in prison, dated from the Stinche in Florence, at eighty years of age, and in extreme poverty; a proof among many, that the patronage of the arts in those days was not a mantle of charity of adequate dimensions to cover the wants of the numerous professors of the art; while it tells somewhat unfavourably for the gratitude of the contemporary world to know, that the one work alone of this deserted old man, the Virgin in the Hospital of Bonifacio Lupi, (so well coloured, says Vasari, that it is to this day in good preservation,) would produce a sum that would probably not only be sufficient to have paid his debts, but to have equalled the wants of no small portion of his prolonged life. The work itself seems to bear testimony to an earnest, amiable, and religious mind; there would appear, therefore, no moral fault to which to attribute his unfortunate condition. We must suppose that struggles with the world's difficulties, incompatible though they seem with art, are necessary; and that the cradle of genius must be first rocked by Want-that necessity is the great "Magister Artium; "for we find it has ever been so, even to the present enlightened age. A few favourites occupy the Goshen of patronage, who at their death

are

not remembered, and whose works do "follow them;" and then, the works of those who have lived neglected, lived, worked, and died in penury, are eagerly sought after at any price. Such men, whilst they lived, were yet teaching a lesson in taste which the world were slow to learn; for it is in the nature of genius to be before the age, and in some respects to teach a novelty, which the world is not prepared to receive. Genius works on by the compulsion of its own nature, and the world is improved by it when it can no longer reward it but by a too late admiration, that reaches not, as far as we know, the dead. The complaint of Horace has been ever justified, and is still, in the eager search after works of our Wilson and Gainsborough

"Virtutem incolumem odimus,

Sublatam ex oculis quærimus invidi.” This edition of Tambroni is not from an original MS. or printed copy, but from a transcript about a century old, discovered by Angelo Mai among the Ottobonican manuscripts. Two other copies of Cennino Cennini are known to exist; we are curious for their examination, the present rescript may in some respects be deficient. As Cennino Cennini completed his work 1437, and the discovery of Van Eyck is said to have been 1410, it might have been expected that we should find some notice of Van Eyck's vehicle. We rather lament than are surprised that we find none. Those were the days for secrecies. Cennino himself speaks of many of his recipes as great secrets; and we are told that Van Eyck only in his old age taught his secret to Antonello-and the whole story goes to show the profound secrecy with which this vehicle was retained; nor is there any reason to doubt that it occasioned the murder of Domenico, said to have been perpetrated in 1470, thirty-three years after the writing of Cennino Cennini. Vasari says positively, that "John Van Eyck would not let any one see him work, nor would he teach the secret to any one-but being old," &c. This is certainly an argument against those who would affirm, if Van Eyck had discovered a vehicle, it would have been universally known. Such secrets are slow in progress, independent of the caution to keep them so. Artists did not formerly spring up self-taught; they were bound to masters, and learned their art from the beginning, and slowly, and learned not many of their secrets till after years of servitude, for such we must call it. They had then to make as well as to grind their own colours, to make their own brushes, tablets, and cloths.

Mrs Merrifield and Tambroni certainly do not agree in their opinions respecting this discovery of a vehicle by Van Eyck. The Italian is rather foolishly sensitive for the honour of his country, and his sensitiveness seems to bias his judgment. He would not that a foreigner should have the merit. Tambroni believes, and probably truly, that Vasari never thoroughly read Cennino; but he

66

a romance or

bears testimony to the noble-mindedness of Vasari-" Whence," says he, "we are constrained to believe that he merely glanced lightly over the titles to the chapters of part of the manuscript; and that, thinking it useless, he did not care to examine and investigate the whole work. For this reason it cannot be supposed that this noble-minded man, so zealous for the honour of his country, and whose every effort had been directed to make it pre-eminent, would withhold from one of his fellow-countrymen the just fame which he deserved by so valuable a work. Nor do I intend here to reprove him, or to lessen his glory. I shall only say that he committed a great error in not having examined the work of this old master: for then, perhaps, he would not so easily have given the credit of those things to strangers which certainly were known in his own beautiful Tuscany, and in all Italy, as I shall hereafter study to prove." Yet he does not hesitate after this to charge "this noble-minded man" with fabricating tale of the imagination." But he misquotes Vasari. As Mrs Merrifield justly observes, "he takes only part of Vasari's account into consideration, instead of stating the whole, and reasoning on it as Lanzi has done. Vasari does not limit Van Eyck's discovery to the simple fact, that he had discovered that linseed and nut oils were more drying than any he had tried; but he adds, "these then, boiled with his other mixtures, made the varnish, which he, as well as all the other painters of the world, had so long desired." It is very singular that this most important passage should have been entirely omitted by the editor, (Tambroni.) It is in these mixtures that the secret consisted, not in using the oils; and we may certainly conclude that the process of Van Eyck was very different from that of Theophilus and Cennino, both of whom used linseed oil without the mixture of any other substance. "It will be observed that lake even was used by Cennino without any addition to increase its drying qualities. The only dryer he mentions (as such) is verdigris, which he used for mordants only. The difference in the texture of pictures painted in the Flemish (that is, Van Eyck's manner)

and those painted with oil alone, or with the modern megilp, (oil and mastic varnish,) is so well known that it is scarcely necessary to allude to it. "Picture-cleaners are perfectly aware of this circumstance, having been instructed by observing the manner in which different solvents act upon such pictures, (spirit-of-wine, for instance, will dissolve old pictures, but it has no effect on pictures painted with oil only. See Lanzi.) Vasari gives no clue by which we can discover of what those mixtures consisted; but we know that what Vasari calls vernice liquida did not form part of them, because that had been tried and disapproved of.See Vasari's Lives of Antonello da Messina, and Alesso Baldovinetti. It is probable that the ingredients were common and cheap, or they would not have been accessible to the greater part of Europe; and they appear to have been equally successful in the sunny clime of Italy as in the fogs of Holland."

The translator here entirely agrees with the learned and indefatigable Lanzi, who, aware of discrepancies of dates, ascribes the "perfect" method to Van Eyck. He gives full credit to the facts as stated by Vasari, and speaks of the difficulties he lay under in obtaining any certain dates, particularly with regard to Venetian matters. That painting in oil was known long prior to Van Eyck, no one who has read the documents upon the subject can for a moment doubt; but it was, in the common way, so inferior in brilliancy, and probably in facility of use to other methods, that it ceased to be in use. It seems pretty clear that this "perfect method" from Flanders, first to Naples, then to Venice; and probably by means of Antonello da Messina, (however some dates may disagree, or it may be possible there were two of that name to have given some confusion to the dates.) In fact, no dates but the strictly historical can be depended upon. There are pictures at Venice with the name of Antonello, and dated 1474-years after his supposed death. We can scarcely suppose that the "noble-minded" Vasari would have fabricated an epitaph for Antonello, if none had ever existed; we know how easily not only epitaphs, but the very monuments that bear them, are

came