easy, that the instrument, almost without our consciousness, is brought to bear on any object, wherever placed; and the range of vision nearly unrestricted.

Moreover, the eye is self-cleaning, self-adjusting, and, like the rest of the fabric, to a certain extent, self-repairing.

The value of sight, as an inlet to knowledge, and a source of enjoyment, no one can duly appreciate. Happily comparatively few have to bewail its loss- a loss how greatly to be deplored!

The Lament in "Samson Agonistes

is but a transcript

of Milton's own feelings, who had both possessed and lost it:

"But chief of all,

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain !
Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,

Dungeon or beggary, or decrepit age!

Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight

Annull'd, which might in part my grief have eased ;
Inferior to the vilest now become

Of man or worm: the vilest here excel me;
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors or without, still as a fool,

In power of others, never in my own;

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse

Without all hope of day!

O first-created Beam, and thou, great Word,
'Let there be light, and light was over all ;'
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree ?
The sun to me is dark,

And silent as the moon,

When she deserts the night,

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true,
That light is in the soul,

She all in every part. Why was the sigh
To such a tender ball as the eye confined,
So obvious and so easy to be quenched?
And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused,
That she might look at will at every pore?
Then had I not been thus exiled from light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried; but, O yet more miserable!
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave;
Buried, yet not exempt,

By privilege of death and burial,

From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs."

And again, in "Paradise Lost: "

Thus, with the year

Seasons return: but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and everduring dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of Knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank

Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,

And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out."

But "He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." Those who have lost their sight are generally very cheerful. The children at the Blind Schools are proverbially so. Dr. Reid, in his treatise on Nervous Diseases, mentions the very remarkable suggestion made by a blind person, in whose hearing the friends of a hypochondriac were consulting what it was best to do for him. "Oh!" said he, without hesitation, "put out his eyes." P. S.

NOTES ON GREAT PICTURES,

"THE TRAGIC MUSE," BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

ALTHOUGH England has hitherto earned a much less distinguished name in Art than several of her Continental neighbours, in some departments she has produced her rivals of the very greatest names of foreign states; and, like Venice, her development of Art has been in strict accordance with her peculiarly social development. Venice, the city of merchants and the emporium of commerce, her thoroughfares thronged with the subjects of many nations from the East and from the West, presenting a constant display to the eye of the painter, so widely different from the other capitals of the numerous Italian states, necessarily developed a distinct and peculiar taste in her artists. The many-coloured costumes of the East engendered a distinctive love of dress in the Venetian painter, so that even the most ordinary religious subject was rendered with all the magnificence of a state feast: the external elements of art prevailed, and the style of the Venetian school became characteristically the ornamental, the church traditions serving only as the ordinary material for the display of pomp and magnificence.

In England, as pictures are virtually excluded from the churches, ecclesiastical art, so important abroad, has been almost impossible; and what is commonly termed "historic art," from the almost exclusive private patronage upon which it had to depend, has been nearly equally depressed.

When we deprive the field of art of both the ecclesiastical and the historical element, little that is really exalted remains. Notwithstanding our close vicinity to Holland, the

familiar domestic scenes which have made the names of the Dutch painters so famous, found few advocates in this country.

Even from the earliest periods of State patronage in England, in the sixteenth century, portraiture is the only line that has received any great development till within quite recent times.

Various English painters have attempted what are considered the higher walks of imaginative art; but unless they have united their more ambitious efforts with portraiture, they have uniformly failed in success, with perhaps the single exception of Benjamin West. Romney and Gainsborough, two of the most successful of Sir Joshua's contemporaries, owed their prosperity to their portraits, in which they were accounted by many even the rivals of Sir Joshua Reynolds as portrait-painters.

Sir Joshua likewise combined history with portrait in later life; and though he produced several very celebrated works of an historical character, it is by his portraits that he has acquired his great name in the British school. Many of these are of a peculiarly successful and great character, in which, without sacrificing individuality, he has embodied a general idea and commanded a general interest.

"Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse,"-of which a fine duplicate at Dulwich, painted for M. De Calonne in 1788, is accessible to all-the original is in the Marquis of Westminster's collection,-is one of the most remarkable works of Sir Joshua, and decidedly the greatest of all his idealised portraits. As a portrait, it may be considered, perhaps, the finest in the world. Even Barry says of it, "It is both for the ideal and executive the finest picture of the kind, perhaps, in the world. Indeed, it is something more than a portrait, and may serve to give an excellent idea of what an enthusiastic mind is apt to conceive of those pictures of

confined history, for which Apelles was so celebrated by the ancient writers." The actress herself, seated on a massive arm-chair or throne, is, as regards both pose and costume, as commanding and magnificent a figure as can be well imagined. Behind her throne are two sombre ministers of evil or of vengeance; the one on her right holding in his hand a dagger, the one on her left raising in both his hands a cup of poison. The chiaroscuro is beautifully managed, the principal light falling so completely on the upper part of the figure of the "Muse" herself, as to make all the accessories thoroughly subordinate; and so successfully, that the fact of all being supported on clouds is, except on a detailed inspection, wholly unobserved. The pose of the figure was chosen by Mrs. Siddons herself, who always expressed a high appreciation of the picture.

A very fine print of this remarkable picture, by Francis Hayward, was published in 1787: the whole effect is admirably given. The original picture was valued by Sir Joshua at 1000 guineas, though he sold it to William Smith, Esq., M.P. for Norwich, for 700. The Marquis of Westminster bought it, in 1822, for the large sum of 17601. Mrs. Siddons, its subject, survived until 1833: she was in her twenty-eighth year only when the picture was painted.

This picture of the "Tragic Muse," though carrying the principle to its utmost extent, displays only the ordinary character of all Sir Joshua Reynolds's finest portraits; they were most of them more or less fancy pieces, especially his female portraits. It was this general interest which he thus contrived to give to his pictures, which places him so much above the ordinary portrait-painters. Notwithstanding that two whole generations have passed away, and the subjects of many portraits are known only by the casual record of their names, from the skilful treatment of his subjects