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by those who see him (p. xxxix.) calling Kemble and Kean 'the greatest actors perhaps that our stage ever had to boast of. ' Of the former, we would be understood to speak with all possible respect; but no one who really could estimate his eminent merits would ever have been led into so great an exaggeration of them: And to place Kean on a level with Garrick, and even above him, is as vile a blunder as it would be to compare Fuseli with Raphael., But we must not too confidently use such topics in arguing with Mr Sass: for he deals out, in the conclusion of his preliminary remarks, so many of the qualities of the greatest artists to the present Royal Academicians, that we fear his standard of perfection is a good deal lower in practice, than his romantic enumeration of the qualities required to form the abstract of a painter, would lead us to expect. Thus, we read of the delicate and beautifully poetic feeling' of one gentleman, whose excellence we willingly allow; the angelic grace and Raffaelle style' of another, whom we never till now heard praised; and the energy-the fire of Fuseli,' by which we presume, is meant the extravagance that renders many of our print-shop windows mere exhibitions of monsters, and almost justifies the interposition of the police. But we had for a moment forgotten our station; we are not professors; and ought not to have outstepped the bounds prescribed to the igno" rance of connoisseurs.' The archery of William Tell may in the eyes of true painters be intelligible and tolerable; the curvilinear arms and legs of a hundred other figures, with their ineffable physiognomies and agonistic postures, may be pleasing and even natural; the attempt to represent Milton's Death by a figure, the supreme beauty of which is its avoiding every trace of particularity, and all that can recal the vulgar image of a skeleton, may be a judicious improvement upon the original:-we cannot pretend to judge of these things, and of their energy and fire.' We only venture, with all humility, to question Mr Kean's superiority over Garrick and Mrs Siddons and some few more of the late and present ornaments of the Drama.

The account of Mr Sass's journey offers much to excite our commendation, and very little matter of blame. He does not profess to give profound disquisitions either upon politics or science; but he is for the most part a fair and candid relater and the information which he communicates cannot fail to assist very materially the ordinary travellers who visit Italy. He writes clearly, unaffectedly, and with sufficient elegance. He is highly to be praised for the honest warmth of his sentiments upon subjects which ought to rouse every Englishman's feelings of honour

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and of national indignation. If upon one or two points we are forced to differ from him, we do so with respect for his disinterested boldness of expression upon unpopular topics; and the information which he conveys upon some other points of this nature, is at once curious and important.

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Our author's route lay from Dieppe, where he entered France, to Paris. He seems to have been biassed in favour of every thing French, by cbserving the excess of the prejudice which usually operates among our worthy countrymen, in the opposite direction. We own, that, although very little inclined towards this ridiculous extreme, we cannot altogether agree with Mr Sass in his warm praises of every thing he sees in France, even the female beauty of all ages. For my own part,' says he,' I 'never saw a pretty Frenchwoman before I visited their country; where I found them all, young and old, highly interest'ing.' Indeed, he admires the country between Paris and Lyons to such a degree, that few travellers, we apprehend, will recognise it in his description. It is far superior,' he says, 'to the country between Paris and the coast; and has more visible signs of population: chateaus and cottages are continually seen, and the land appears everywhere richly cultivated.'-With Lyons, he is almost as much captivated as with Paris; and exclaims, that, to reside there, in such a climate, surrounded by all the attractions of Nature, united with the ' comforts of civilization,' would be the height of happinessand might almost be termed voluptuousness. One should have marvelled, had he written this after being in Italy.

Proceeding over the magnificent route of the Mont Cenis, one of the many benefits which travellers owe to Buonaparte, he arrives at Turin; and naturally enough, but not very respectfully, remarks, that the King of Sardinia, who resides here, is not much respected by the people, who take every opportunity of ridiculing him. 'We fear the poor Piedmontese have little else but this merriment to comfort them under his Sardinian Majesty's happy sway.-At Genoa, he of course hears still more against this monarch and his usurpation.

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'The Genoese appear to retain all their ancient spirit; and nothing seems to gall them so much as being under the Sardinian government, which they detest. The Piedmontese and the Genoese have always been at enmity with each other; and being now placed under the same king, the whole of the odium falls on his Sardinian Majesty. The Genoese say they should glory in being under the British government; but, tied down under those who know not how to appreciate them, they suffer the most odious impositions and exactions. The city is filled with troops, as if it were a besieged town; and the rattling of drums is heard from morning till night. They say that

there are more troops than can be paid; and if it were not from the -fear of an English fleet, they would expel the whole of them in twenty-four hours. The soldiers are openly insulted; the government is execrated; and, so little respect have they for the king, that a man carrying his bust along the street, was offered by three different persons, fifty and a hundred livres each, to let them throw a stone at it. Such is the present state of Genoa, worthy of being a colony and an ally of England.-The English are described as suffering more restrictions than any other nation; and we found, from our own experience under the Piedmontese government, more delays and exactions from the police and its other officers, than in any other state. In Genoa the police and the various consuls play into each other's hands, so that each may have his share of the plunder of the traveller.' p. 65, 66.

All that we saw reminded us of the former power of Genoa ; but the Genoese citizens, with whom we conversed, although evincing in themselves an independence of spirit, such as we do not often meet with on the Continent, told us that Genoa was now but a shadow of its former self: they lamented they were betrayed by those for whom they had the greatest respect, and assured us it was only under a solemn promise their independence should be recognised, that they admitted the English troops. In spite, however, of this, they were delivered into the power of a narrow-minded tyranny. It is painful to hear our country, whose character has stood so high, thus charged with a breach of faith. However, there is some satisfaction, that they seem to know from whence it springs, and make a distinction between the ministers of our great empire and its people. We were greatly indebted to the friendship of a Genoese merchant, who, as he told us, for the love he bore the English, in which he was joined by the whole city, wished to pay us every possible attention.

p. 70-1. Mr Sass, with the true spirit of an Englishman, frequently expresses how much he was delighted to find the distinction universally taken in Italy, between the people of England and her ministers. He is not the only traveller who has found the former the objects of confidence, esteem and hope; the latter of contempt, distrust, and aversion.

Our author went by sea from Genoa to Leghorn, and from thence by Pisa to Rome, without going to Florence. He complains bitterly of the Italian travelling; and no wonder ;—for he certainly contrives to take the road to Rome which is by far the most inconvenient in every respect from beginning to end. He goes from Turin to Genoa, and from thence, by sea, in a felucca to Leghorn;-the finest road in Europe, perhaps, being from Turin to Milan, and from thence to Bologna. He then gets into the notoriously bad route of Radicofani; whereas, by taking Florence in his way, he might have chosen the far better road of Perugia. No wonder that he should complain of hav

ing to clamber up mountains and rugged cliffs, and descend from their summits, down steep declivities full of precipices, ⚫ with almost the fearful velocity of a rapid current.

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At Rome, his enthusiasm for the antique, though natural, is somewhat extravagant. Thus he exclaims of St Peter's, Contemptible!-it cannot bear a comparison with the ruins of an'cient Rome.' Yet the proud saying of Michael Angelo, that he would lift the dome of the Pantheon, and place it aloft in the air, has been, by the general assent of mankind, allowed to be fulfilled. We are, however, very far from differing with Mr Sass in his invectives against those founders of families and palaces, who scrupled not to build them of the spoils of ancient Rome.

'Not all the civil brawls; not all the ignorance and want of taste in the latter emperors; not all the rage and indiscriminate fury of the barbarians, nor the bigotry and fanatic zeal of the darker ages, have tended so much to the destruction of ancient Rome, as those families who, in their wretched feeling, would build themselves palaces by the spoliation of the finest monuments of Roman grandeur. Such is the fact, they have not only robbed, but they have utterly destroyed many of the finest works. They had not even the faculty of appropriation. How many cornices, fluted columns, and beautifully executed capitals, have I seen cut up and used as merely blocks of marble! And after they had accomplished this destruction, what have they produced? Buildings and streets, which are a disgrace to the local beauties of the hills of Rome. With feelings of sorrow and indignation, which it was impossible to suppress, we wandered through the streets of this modern city; and could not proceed many paces without witnessing some of these works of destruction, in columns of porphyry or verde-antique, cut down for door-pests, to grace the entry of paltry court-yards. Reflecting on these changes, and to what use the best things may be converted, we were accosted by a tawdry dressed jackanapes, powdered, and bespattered with tinsel, a running footman, who told us we should be run over by the equipage that followed, if we did not move. p. 101, 102.

It is pleasing to observe, that the exertions of some foreigners are now excited in an opposite direction, and are occupied in discovering and preserving the remains of antiquity, which Time, and Popes, and Cardinals, have still spared. Among those persons deserving so well of the arts, Mr Sass records, with just praise, the Dutchess of Devonshire, whose munificence and taste are the theme of merited applause, wherever the cultivation of the arts is duly appreciated. He mentions the excavations carried on by her Grace in the Forum, and which have already led to material discoveries, and promise still more. Since the date of his publication, that noble person has conferred an additional

favour on the lovers of ancient literature, by printing an exquisite edition of Horace's Journey to Brundusium, at the celebrated Bodoni press of Parma-with an Italian translation, and prints illustrative of the narrative. The typography is perfect; the translation is extremely well executed; and the plates are admirable. The two in aquatinta are, doubtless, inferior to the others; but those engraved in stroke are worthy of the highest commendation; and the drawing of the whole is excellent. We regret that this beautiful little work is only destined to gratify the luxury of collectors, and cannot help wishing that her Grace may be induced to bestow upon the publick the larger work which she is preparing, the Illustrations of the Æneid. Heartily agreeing with our author, that these are acts which show true nobility,' we should have been wanting in the gratitude so justly due to this distinguished lady, had we omitted the present notice of that patronage which she extends to the arts, effectually as well as modestly, without any pretension, and from no conceivable motive but that of encouraging the study, and gratifying a liberal and enlightened taste.

We are disposed to agree also with Mr Sass in the satisfaction which he expresses at the rescue, by Lord Elgin, of the most exquisite specimens of ancient sculpture from the devastations of the barbarians into whose hands they had fallen. It is a happy circumstance for the arts, and a glorious one for this country, that we have, by this accident, become possessed of such inestimable treasures. Their transcendent merits have been often dwelt upon; all who view them, in their present convenient position at the British Museum, readily admit their high value, and allow that the inspection of them is daily improving the taste and the execution of even our best artists; but few are aware of the progress which has been made, by one of these ingenious persons, in exhibiting a correct and exquisite representation of them in miniature; and we feel it right here to mention his labours. Mr.Henning, a native of this country, who unites to the justest taste, and the greatest powers of execution, a degree of general knowledge almost unexampled in his profession, has finished the most perfect models of a great part of the frieze, and is going on with his work. Whoever is desirous of possessing a perfect miniature of this great piece of sculpture, may thus be furnished with it by means of Mr Henning's casts. The retirement natural to modest genius, and the obscurity too often the lot of unprotected strangers, have hitherto kept this most deserving artist from reaping the rewards which he might have expected under more favourable' circumstances; but we shall be greatly surprised if the discriminating

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