It is thus treated.  Our Saviour has just breathed his dying exclamation—­“it is finished.”  His head hangs down—­cold, pale death being imprinted upon every feature of the face.  It is perhaps a painfully-deadly countenance:  copied, I make no doubt, from nature.  St. Anne, Mary, and St. John, are the only attendants.  The former is quite absorbed in agony—­her head is lowly inclined, and her arms are above it. (The pattern of the drapery is rather singular).  Mary exhibits a more quiet expression:  her resignation is calm and fixed, while her heart seems to be broken.  But it is in the figure and countenance of St. John, that the artist has reached all that an artist could reach in a delineation of the same subject.  The beloved disciple simply looks upwards—­upon the breathless corpse of his crucified master.  In that look, the world appears to be for ever forgotten.  His arms and hands are locked together, in the agony of his soul.  There is the sublimest abstraction from every artificial and frivolous accompaniment—­in the treatment of this subject—­which you can possibly conceive.  The background of the picture is worthy of its nobler parts.  There is a sobriety of colouring about it which Annibal Caracci would not have disdained to own.  I should add, that there is a folding compartment on each side of the principal subject, which, moving upon hinges, may be turned inwards, and shut the whole from view.  Each of these compartments contains one of the two thieves who were crucified with Our Saviour.  There is a figure of S. Lazarus below one of them, which is very fine for colour and drawing.

The last, in the series of old pictures by German masters, which I have time to notice, is an exceedingly curious and valuable one by CHRISTOPHER AMBERGER.  It represents the Adoration of the Magi.  There are throughout very successful attempts at reflected light; but what should set this picture above all price, in my humble estimation, is a portrait—­and the finest which I remember to have seen—­of MELANCTHON:—­executed when he was in the vigour of life, and in the full possession of physiognomical expression.  He is introduced in the stable just over those near the Virgin, who are coming to pay their homage to the infant Christ:  and is habited in black, with a black cap on.  Mr. Lewis made the following rough copy of the head in pencil.  To the best of my recollection, there is no engraving of it—­so that you will preserve the enclosed for me, for the purpose of having it executed upon copper, when I reach England.  It is a countenance full of intellectual expression.

[Illustration]

Of the supposed Titians, Caraccis, Guidos, Cignanis, and Paolo Veroneses, I will not presume to say one word; because I have great doubts about their genuineness, or, at any rate, integrity of condition.  I looked about for Albert Durer, and Lucas Cranach, and saw with pleasure the portraits of my old friends Maximilian I. and Charles V. by the former—­and a Samson and Dalila by the latter:  but neither, I think, in the very first rate style of the artist.