We can study anatomy, if (like a certain princess) we have a taste that way, in the surgeon’s dissecting-room; we do not look upon pictures to have our minds agonized and contaminated by the sight of human turpitude and barbarity, streaming blood, quivering flesh, wounds, tortures, death, and horrors in every shape, even though it should be all very natural.  Painting has been called the handmaid of nature; is it not the duty of a handmaid to array her mistress to the best possible advantage?  At least to keep her infirmities from view and not to expose her too undressed?

But I am not so weak, so cowardly, so fastidious, as to shrink from every representation of human suffering, provided that our sympathy be not strained beyond a certain point.  To please is the genuine aim of painting, as of all the fine arts; when pleasure is conveyed through deeply excited interest, by affecting the passions, the senses, and the imagination, painting assumes a higher character, and almost vies with tragedy:  in fact, it is tragedy to the eye, and is amenable to the same laws.  The St. Sebastians of Guido and Razzi; the St. Jerome of Domenichino; the sternly beautiful Judith of Allori; the Pieta of Raffaelle; the San Pietro Martire of Titian; are all so many tragic scenes wherein whatever is revolting in circumstances or character is judiciously kept from view, where human suffering is dignified by the moral lesson it is made to convey, and its effect on the beholder at once softened and heightened by the redeeming grace which genius and poetry have shed like a glory round it.

Allowing all this, I am yet obliged to confess that I am wearied with this class, of pictures, and that I wish there were fewer of them.

But there is one subject which never tires, at least never tires me, however varied, repeated, multiplied.  A subject so lovely in itself that the most eminent painter cannot easily embellish it, or the meanest degrade it; a subject which comes home to our own bosoms and dearest feelings; and in which we may “lose ourselves in all delightfulness,” and indulge unreproved pleasure.  I mean the Virgin and Child, or in other words, the abstract personification of what is loveliest, purest, and dearest, under heaven—­maternal tenderness, virgin meekness, and childish innocence, and the beauty of holiness over all.

It occurred to me to-day, that if a gallery could be formed of this subject alone, selecting one specimen from among the works of every painter, it would form not only a comparative index to their different styles, but we should find, on recurring to what is known of the lives and characters of the great masters, that each has stamped some peculiarity of his own disposition on his Virgins; and that, after a little consideration and practice, a very fair guess might be formed of the character of each artist, by observing the style in which he has treated this beautiful and favourite subject.