aimed at Sir J——­s M——­h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostacy, as F. pronounced it, (it is hardly worth particularising), happening to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, as he then delighted to be called, Citizen Stanhope, deprived F. at once of the last hopes of a guinea from the last patron that had stuck by us; and breaking up our establishment, left us to the safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers.—­It was about this time, or a little earlier, that Dan.  Stuart made that curious confession to us, that he had “never deliberately walked into an Exhibition at Somerset House in his life.”

BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART

Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty years, or since the humour of exhibiting began, that has treated a story imaginatively?  By this we mean, upon whom his subject has so acted, that it has seemed to direct him—­not to be arranged by him?  Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have impressed themselves so tyrannically, that he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revelation?  Any that has imparted to his compositions, not merely so much truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, but that individualising property, which should keep the subject so treated distinct in feature from every other subject, however similar, and to common apprehensions almost identical; so as that we might say, this and this part could have found an appropriate place in no other picture in the world but this?  Is there anything in modern art—­we will not demand that it should be equal—­but in any way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the “Ariadne,” in the National Gallery?  Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr rout about him, re-peopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at the Cretan.  This is the time present.  With this telling of the story an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud.  Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no further.  But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect.  With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god,—­as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant—­her soul undistracted from Theseus—­Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at day-break to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.