heart, shared in the general grief; they seemed to forget the degradation in which their commander was involved, the hardships to which they had been exposed, and the destruction which he had brought upon their brethren in arms; they remembered him when he stood victorious on the field of Austerlitz, or passed in triumph through the gates of Moscow, and shed over the fall of their emperor those tears of genuine sorrow which they denied to the deepest scenes of private suffering, or the most aggravated instances of individual distress.

cept the extensive view which is to be met with at its summit. The heights of Belleville are varied with wood, with orchards, vine yards, and gardens, interspersed with cottages and villas, and cultivated with the utmost care. There are few enclosures, but the whole extent of the ground is thickly studded with walnuts, fruit-trees, and forest timber, which, from a distance, give it the appearance of one continued wood. On a nearer approach, however, you find it intersected in every direction by small paths, which wind among the vineyards, or through the woods with which the hills are covered, and present, at every turn, those charming little scenes which form the peculiar characteristic of woodland scenery. The cottages, half hid by the profusion of fruit-trees, or embosomed in the luxuriant woods, with which they are everywhere surrounded, increase the interest which the scenery itself is fitted to produce; they combine the

the beauty of the spot on which his dwelling is placed; and awaken, in the midst of the boundless luxuriance of vegetable nature, those deeper feelings of moral delight, which spring from the contemplation of human happiness.

The infantry of the old guard was frequently to be seen drawn up in line in the streets of Fontainbleau, and their appearance was such as fully answered the idea we had formed of that body of veteran soldiers, who had borne the French eagles through every capital of Europe. Their aspect was bold and martial; there was a keenness in their eyes which bespoke the characteristic intelligence of the French soldiers, and a ferocity in the expres-delightful idea of the peasant's enjoyment with sion of their countenances which seemed to have been unsubdued even by the unparalleled disasters in which their country had been involved. The people of the town itself complained in the bitterest terms of their licentious conduct, and repeatedly said that they dreaded them more as friends than the Cos- The effect of the charming scenery on the sacks themselves as enemies. They seemed heights of Belleville, is much increased by to harbour the most unbounded resentment the distant objects which terminate some parts against the people of this country; their coun- of the view. To the east, the high and gloomy tenances bore the expression of the strongest towers of Vincennes rise over the beautiful enmity against the English. Whatever the woods with which the sides of the hill are atrocity of their conduct; however it might adorned; and give an air of solemnity to the have been to the people of their own, as well as scene, arising from the remembrance of the every other country, it was impossible not tragic events of which it was the theatre. To to feel the strongest emotion at the sight of the south, the domes and spires of Paris can the veteran soldiers whose exploits had so occasionally be discovered through the openlong rivetted the attention of all who felt an ings of the wood with which the foreground interest in the civilized world. These were is enriched, and present the capital at that the men who first raised the glory of the re-pleasing distance, when the minuter parts of publican armies on the plains of Italy; who the buildings are concealed, when its promi survived the burning climate of Egypt, and nent features alone are displayed, and the chained victory to the imperial standards at whole is softened by the obscure light which Jena, at Friedland and Austerlitz-who fol- distance throws over the objects of nature. lowed the career of victory to the walls of the To an English mind, the effect of the whole is Kremlin, and marched undaunted through the infinitely increased, by the animating assoranks of death amid the snows of Russia;-ciations with which this scenery is connected; who witnessed the ruin of France under the-by the remembrance of the mighty struggle walls of Leipsic, and struggled to save its between freedom and slavery, which was here falling fortune on the heights of Laon; and who preserved, in the midst of national humiliation, and when surrounded by the mighty foreign powers, that undaunted air and unshaken firmness, which, even in the moment of defeat, commanded the respect of their antagonists in arms.

There is no scenery round Paris so striking as the Forest of Fontainbleau, but the heights of Belleville exhibit nature in a more pleasing aspect, and are distinguished by features of a gentler character. Montmartre, and the ridge of Belleville, form those celebrated heights which command Paris on the northern side, and which were so obstinately contested between the allies and the French, on the 30th March, 1814, previous to the capture of Paris by the allied sovereigns. Montmartre is covered for the most part with houses, and presents nothing to attract the eye of the observer, ex

terminated;-of the heroic deeds which were here performed, and the unequalled magnanimity which was here displayed. It was here that the expiring efforts of military despotism were overthrown-that the armies of Russia stood triumphant over the power of France, and nobly avenged the ashes of their own capital, by sparing that of their prostrate enemy.

At this time the traces of the recent struggle were visibly imprinted on the villages and woods with which the hill is covered. The marks of blood were still to be discerned on the chausseé which leads through the village of Pantin; the elm trees which line the road were cut asunder or bored through with cannon shot, and their stems riddled in many parts, with the incessant fire of the grape shot. The houses in La Villette, Belleville, and Pantin, were covered with the marks of musket shot; the windows of many were shattered, or wholly

destroyed, and the interior of the rooms broken by the balls which seemed to have pierced every part of the building. So thickly were the houses in some places covered with these marks, that it appeared almost incredible how any one could have escaped from so destructive a fire. Even the beautiful gardens with which the slope of the heights are adorned, and the inmost recesses of the wood of Romainville, bore, throughout, the marks of the desperate struggles which they had lately witnessed, and exhibited the symptoms of fracture or destruction in the midst of the luxuriance of natural beauty;-yet, though they had so recently been the scene of mortal combat; though the ashes of the dead lay yet in heaps on different parts of the field of battle, the prolific powers of nature were undecayed: the vines clustered round the broken fragments of the instruments of war,-the corn spread a sweeter green over the fields, which were yet wet with human blood, and the trees waved with renovated beauty over the uncoffined remains of the departed brave; emblematic of the decay of man, and of the immortality of

nature.

The French have often been accused of selfishness, and the indifference which they often manifest to the fate of their relations affords too much reason to believe that the social affections have little permanent influence on their minds. They exhibit, however, in misfortunes of a different kind-in calamities which really press upon their own enjoyments of life-the same gayety of heart, and the same undisturbed equanimity of disposition. That gayety in

misfortune, which is so painful to every observer, when it is to be found in the midst of family distress, becomes delightful when it exists under the deprivation of the selfish gratification to which the individual had been accustomed. Both here, and in other parts of France, where the houses of the peasants had been wholly destroyed by the allied armies, there was much to admire in the equanimity of mind with which these poor people bore the loss of all their property. For an extent of thirty miles in one direction, towards the north of Champagne, every house near the great road had been burned or pillaged for the firewood which it contained, both by the French and allied armies, and the people were every where compelled to sleep in the open air. The men were everywhere rebuilding their fallen walls, with a cheerfulness which never would have existed in England under similar circumstances; and the little children laboured in the gardens during the day, and slept under the vines at night, without exhibiting any signs of distress for their disconsolate situation. In many places we saw groups of these little children in the midst of the ruined houses, or under the shattered trees, playing with the musket shot, or trying to roll the cannon balls by which the destruction of their dwellings had been effected:-exhibiting a picture of youthful joy and native innocence, while sporting with the instruments of human destruction, which the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds would have moulded into the expression of pathetic feeling, or employed as the means of moral improvement.

THE LOUVRE IN 1814.*

To those who have had the good fortune to For an attempt of this kind, the Louvre presee the pictures and statues which are pre-sents singular advantages, from the unparalserved in the Louvre, all description of these works must appear superfluous; and to those who have not had this good fortune, such an attempt could convey no adequate idea of the objects which are described. There is nothing more uninteresting than the catalogue of pictures which are to be found in the works of many modern travellers; nor any thing in general more ridiculous than the ravings of admiration with which this catalogue is described, and with which the reader in general is little disposed to sympathize. Without attempting, therefore, to enumerate the great works which are there to be met with, it is better to aim at nothing but the delineation of the general character by which the different schools of painting are distinguished, and the great features in which they all differ from the sculpture of ancient times.

Written during a residence at Paris in May and June, 1814, and published in "Travels in France," in

1814-15, to the first volume of which the author contributed a few chapters.

leled collection of paintings of every school and description which are there to be met with, and the facility with which you can there trace the progress of the art from its first beginning to the period of its greatest perfection. And it is in this view that the collection of these works into one museum, however much to be deplored as the work of unprincipled ambition, and however much it may have diminished the impression which particular objects, from the influence of association, produced in their native place, is yet calculated to produce the greatest of all improvements in the progress of the art; by divesting particular schools and particular works of the unbounded influence which the effect of early association, or the prejudices of national feeling, have given them in their original situation, and placing them where their real nature is to be judged of by a more extended circle, and subjected to the examination of more impartial sentiments.

The first hall of the Louvre, in the picture

K

justice, the variety of design, the accuracy of | grossness in his conception of the female form, drawing, or delicacy of finishing, which dis- which destroys the symmetry of female beauty; tinguish his works from those of any other and a wildness of imagination in his general painter of a similar description. There are design, which violates the feelings of ordinary forty of his pieces there assembled, all in the taste. You survey his pictures with astonishfinest state of preservation, and all displaying ment-and the power of thought and the bril the same unrivalled beauty of colouring and liancy of colouring which they display; but execution. In their design, however, they they produce no lasting impression on the widely differ; and they exhibit, in the most mind; they have struck no chord of feeling or striking manner, the real object to which emotion, and you leave them with no other painting should be applied, and the causes feeling, than that of regret, that the confusion of the errors in which its composition has of objects destroys the effect which each in been involved. His works, for the most itself might be fitted to produce. And if one part, are crowded with figures; his subjects has made a deeper impression; if you dwell are in general battle-pieces, or spectacles of on it with that delight which it should ever be military pomp, or the animated scenes which the object of painting to produce, you find the chase presents; and he seems to have ex- that your pleasure proceeds from a single hausted all the efforts of his genius, in the figure, or the expression of a detached part of variety of incident and richness of execution, the picture; and that in the contemplation of which these subjects are fitted to afford. From it you have, without being conscious of it, the confused and indeterminate expression detached your mind from the observation of however, which the multitude of their objects all that might interfere with its characteristic exhibit, the spectator turns with delight to expression, and thus preserved that unity of those simpler scenes in which his mind seems emotion which is essential to the existence of to have reposed, after the fatigues which it the emotion of taste, but which the confusion had undergone; to the representation of a of incident is so apt to destroy. single incident, or the delineation of a certain occurrence to the rest of the traveller after the fatigues of the day-to the repose of the horse in the intermission of labour-to the return of the soldier, after the dangers of the campaign;-scenes in which every thing combines for the uniform character, and where the genius of the artist has been able to give to the rudest occupations of men, and even to the objects of animal life, the expression of genuine poetical feeling.

It is in the Italian school, however, that the collection in the Louvre is most unrivalled, and it is from its character that the general tendency of the modern school of historical painting is principally to be determined.

The general object of the Italian school appears to be the expression of passion. The peculiar subjects which its painters were called on to represent, the sufferings and death of our Saviour, the varied misfortunes to which his disciples were exposed, or the multiplied persecutions which the early fathers of the church had to sustain, inevitably prescribed the object to which their genius was to be directed, and the peculiar character which their works were to assume. have all, accordingly, aimed at the expression of passion, and endeavoured to excite the pity, or awaken the sympathy of the spectator; though the particular species of passion which they have severally selected has varied with the turn of mind which the artist possessed.

They

The pictures of Vandyke and Rubens belong to a much higher school than that which rose out of the wealth and the limited taste of the Dutch people. There are sixty pictures of the latter of these masters in the Louvre, and, combined with the celebrated gallery in the Luxembourg palace, they form the finest assemblage of them which is to be met with in the world. The character of his works differs essentially from that both of the French and the Dutch schools: he was employed, not in painting cabinet pictures for wealthy mer- The works of Dominichino and of the Cachants, but in designing great altar pieces for raccis, of which there are a very great numsplendid churches, or commemorating the ber, incline, in general, to the representation glory of sovereigns in imperial galleries. The of what is dark or gloomy in character, or greatness of his genius rendered him fit to what is terrific and appalling in suffering. attempt the representation of the most com- The subjects which the first of these masters plicated and difficult objects; but in the confi- has in general selected, are the cells of monks, dence of this genius, he seems to have lost the energy of martyrs, the death of saints, or sight of the genuine object of composition in the sufferings of the crucifixion; and the darkhis art. He attempts what it is impossible for blue coldness of his colouring, combined with painting to accomplish. He aims at telling a the depth of his shadows, accord well with the whole story by the expression of a single pic-gloomy character which his compositions posture; and seems to pour forth the profusion sess. The Caraccis, amidst the variety of obof his fancy, by crowding his canvas with a jects which their genius has embraced, have multiplicity of figures, which serve no other purpose than that of showing the endless power of creation which the author possessed. In each figure, there is great vigour of conception, and admirable power of execution; but the whole possesses no general character, and produces no permanent emotion. There is a mixture of allegory and truth in many of his greatest works, which is always painful; a

dwelt, in general, upon the expression of sorrow-of that deep and profound sorrow which the subjects of sacred history were so fitted to afford, and which was so well adapted to that religious emotion which it was their object to excite.

Guido Reni, Carlo Maratti, and Murillo, are distinguished by a gentler character; by the expression of tenderness and sweetness of dis

position and the subjects which they have| There is but one picture by Carlo Dolci in chosen are, for the most part, those which the Louvre; but it alone is sufficient to mark were fitted for the display of this predominant the exquisite genius which its author posexpression; the Holy Family, the flight into Egypt, the youth of St. John, the penitence of the Magdalene. While, in common with all their brethren, they have aimed at the expression of emotion, it was an emotion of a softer kind than that which arose from the energy of passion, or the violence of suffering; it was the emotion produced by more permanent feelings, and less turbulent affections; and from the character of this emotion, their execution has assumed a peculiar cast, and their composition been governed by a peculiar principle. Their colouring is seldom brilliant;-and in the unbroken repose of which the there is a subdued tone pervading the greater part of their pictures; and they have limited themselves, in general, to the delineation of a single figure, or a small group, in which a single character of mind is prevalent.