ever it may be, good or bad, it seems to me that it is now too late for any thing of the kind. On what monument could we look with more respect than on a tablet inscribed with his name; leaving out, of course, the common-place doggerel about Zeuxis and Apelles? * And what performance, in the way of "storied urn or animated bust," will not suggest a comparison with his own excelling works? What can do him more honor than the simple recognition of his excellence, living, as it does in the divine productions of his art, which are everywhere around us? How much better to have restored his house-that home he so loved-and converted it into some national institution? It as much deserves this distinction as the Palace of the Foscari;t the size and situation are even more favorable for such a purpose; and this would have been a monument worthy of the generous heart of Titian. Arquà still boasts of the house of Petrarch ;—Ferrara still shows, with pride, the little study of Ariosto;-Sorrento, the cradle of Tasso; -Urbino, the modest dwelling in which Raphael saw the light;-Florence, the Casa Buonarotti. In Venice, the house of Titian is abandoned to the most heartless neglect; and the people now think as little of it as we do of the house in Crutched *The inscription, "Qui giace il gran Tiziano Vecelli was written by one of the monks of the convent. ↑ Which is to be converted into a School of Engineers. Friers, where Milton wrote his "Paradise Lost." If it were in a village, three hundred miles off, we should be making pilgrimages to it; but the din of a city deafens the imagination to all such voices from the dead. WASHINGTON ALLSTON, AND HIS AXIOMS ON ART. JANUARY 1, 1844. It has been suggested that I should throw together such notes and reminiscences as occur to me relative to Allston, his character, and his works. I commence the task, not without a feeling of reverential timidity, wishing that it had fallen into more competent hands;—and yet gladly;-strong in the feeling that it is a debt due to his memory; since, when living, he honored me so far as to desire I should be the expositor of some of his opinions, thoughts, and aims as an artist. I knew him, and count among the memorable passages of ny life the few brief hours spent in communion with him : "Benedetto sia il giorno, e'l mese, It is understood that his letters, papers, and other memorials of his life, have been left by will at the disposal of a gifted relative every way capable of fulfilling the task of biographer.* Meantime, these few personal recollections, these fragments of his own mind, which I am able to give, will be perused with the sympathy of indulgence by those who in the artist reverenced the man; and with interest, and perhaps with advantage, by those who knew the artist only in his works. In the When in America, I was struck by the manner in which the imaginative talent of the people had thrown itself forth in painting; the country seemed to me to swarm with painters. Western States society was too new to admit of more than blind and abortive efforts in Art; genius itself was extinguished amid the mere material wants of existence; the green wood kindled, and was consumed in its own smoke, and gave forth no visible flame either to warm or to enlighten. In the Eastern States, the immense proportion of positively and outrageously bad painters, was, in a certain sense, a consolation and an encouragement; there was too much genius for mediocrity; -they had started from a wrong point;—and in the union of self-conceit and ignorance with talent --and in the absence of all good models, or any guiding-light-they had certainly put forth perpe His brother-in-law, Mr. Dana, himself a poet, and whose son wrote that admirable book, "Two Years before the Mast." Up to this time (May, 1846) the promised Memoir has not appeared. trations not to be equalled in originality and perversity. The case, individually, was as hopeless as mediocrity would be in any other country;— but here was the material ready;-the general, the national talent to be worked out. I remember a young American, who, having gained a local celebrity in some township, or perhaps sore Sovereign State, about as old as himself, and as wise, had betaken himself to Italy. I met him at Vienna as he was hurrying back; he had travelled from Milan to Naples, and found all barren; he said he had "looked over the old masters, and could see nothing in them-all their fame nothing but old-world cant and prejudice!" I thought of some, who, under the same circumstances and influences, would have gone back and rent their garments, or at least their canvas, and begun anew. this young man may have since done remains, with his name, unknown. I found some others actuated by a far different spirit;-laboring hard for what they could get ;-living on bread and water, and going in threadbare coats, aye, and brimless hats, that they might save enough to make a voyage to Europe. Some I found looking at Nature, and imitating her in her more obvious external aspects, with such a simplicity and earnestness, that their productions, in spite of most crude and defective execution, fixed attention. Some had stirred deeper waters,-had begun aright,-had given indications of high promise, of high power, --yet, for want of a more exalted standard of taste What to keep the feeling of beauty striving upwards, pure and elevated, were degenerating gradually into vulgarity, littleness, and hopeless mannerism Coleridge says somewhere, "The Arts and the Muses both spring forth in the youth of nations, like Minerva from the front of Jupiter, all armed." Now this is not true of America-at least not yet. 1 remember that when I was at Boston, and possessed for the time with the idea of Allston and his pictures, I made the acquaintance of Father Taylor, a man whose ordinary conversation was as poetical, as figurative, as his sermons, and I could add, as earnest and as instructive; poetry seemed the natural element of his mind, and "he could not ope his mouth but out there flew a trope," unaffectedly and spontaneously, however, as it were, unconsciously. One evening, when deprecating the idea of rivalry between England and America, he said, "Are they not one and the same? even as Jacob's vine, which being planted on one side of the wall, grew over it, and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side-but still it was the same vine, nourished from the same root." Now to vary a little this apposite and beautiful illustration, I would say, that while America can gather grapes from the old vine, she will not plant for herself, nor even cherish the off-shoots; in other words,-America, as long as she can import our muses cheap, will have no muses of her own-no literature; for half a dozen or a dozen charming authors do not make |