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THE COSMOPOLITE.

A CHAPTER OF BULLS.

  I confess it is what the English call a bull, in the expression,
  though the sense be manifest enough.—­POPE.

We are friends to the exposition of the weak sides of great men, inasmuch as it reads them a valuable lesson on their own infallibility, and tends to lower the molehills of conceit that are raised in the world as stumbling-blocks along every road of petty ambition.  It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and pen, to which all men are liable in their unguarded moments—­from Homer to Anacreon Moore, or Demosthenes to Mr. Brougham.  Our course is rather that of a good-humoured expose, the worst effect of which will be to raise a laugh at the expense of poor humanity, or a merited smile at our own dulness and mistaken sense of the ridiculous.

First, of the ancient Poets, who make departed spirits know things past and to come, yet ignorant of things present.  Agamemnon foretels what should happen to Ulysses, yet ignorantly inquires what is become of his own son.  The ghosts are afraid of swords in Homer, yet Sibylla tells Aeneas in Virgil, that the then habit of spirits was beyond the force of weapons.  The spirits put off their malice with their bodies; and Caesar and Pompey accord in Latin hell; yet Ajax in Homer, endures not a conference with Ulysses.

In Painting alone we have a rich harvest.  Burgoyne in his travels, notices a painting in Spain, where Abraham is preparing to shoot Isaac with a pistol!

There is a painting at Windsor, of Antonio Verrio, in which, he has introduced himself, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Bap.  May, surveyor of the works, in long periwigs, as spectators of Christ healing the sick.

In the Luxembourg is a picture of Reubens, in which are the queen-mother in council, with two cardinals, and Mercury!

There may be, also, a sort of anachronism of the limbs, as in the case of the painter of Toledo, who painted the story of the three wise men of the east coming to worship, and bringing their presents to our Lord, upon his birth, at Bethlehem, whence he presents them as three Arabian, or Indian kings; two of them are white, and one of them black; but, unhappily, when he drew the latter part of them kneeling, which, to be sure, was done after their faces, their legs being necessarily a little intermixed, he made three black feet for the negro king, and but three white feet for the two white kings; and yet never discovered the mistake till the piece was presented to the king, and hung up in the great church.

There was, also, in the Houghton Hall collection, Velvet Brughel’s Adoration of the Magi, in which were a multitude of figures, all finished with the greatest Dutch exactness; in fact, the ideas are rather a little too Dutch, for the Ethiopian king is dressed in a surplice, with boots and spurs, and brings, for a present, a gold model of a modern ship.