Here are two points miraculously co-uniting; fierce society, with the feeling of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations, with the accidents of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the present Bacchus, with the past Ariadne; two stories, with double Time; separate, and harmonising.  Had the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have been the story of the mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid accident of a flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance.  The broken heart for Theseus was not lightly to be pieced up by a God.

We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael in the Vatican.  It is the Presentation of the newborn Eve to Adam by the Almighty.  A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men since born.  But these are matters subordinate to the conception of the situation, displayed in this extraordinary production.  A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain raptures of connubial anticipation, with a suitable acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the first bridegroom; something like the divided attention of the child (Adam was here a child man) between the given toy, and the mother who had just blest it with the bauble.  This is the obvious, the first-sight view, the superficial.  An artist of a higher grade, considering the awful presence they were in, would have taken care to subtract something from the expression of the more human passion, and to heighten the more spiritual one.  This would be as much as an exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset House to last year’s show, has been encouraged to look for.  It is obvious to hint at a lower expression, yet in a picture, that for respects of drawing and colouring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these art-fostering walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety-nine, the gratitude as one, or perhaps Zero!  By neither the one passion nor the other has Raphael expounded the situation of Adam.  Singly upon his brow sits the absorbing sense of wonder at the created miracle.  The moment is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of the conflicting emotions—­a moment how abstracted—­have had time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery.—­We have seen a landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in which he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely beautiful in antiquity—­the gardens of the Hesperides.  To do Mr. ——­ justice, he had painted a laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme by Poussin is somehow a fac-simile for the situation), looking over into the world shut out backwards, so that none but a “still-climbing Hercules” could hope to catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses.  No conventual porter could keep