a national literature; but she cannot import our painters, therefore I have some hope that she will produce a national and original school of art. Is it not much that America in her youthhood has already sent forth so many painters of European celebrity? Once it was her glory, that she had given us West; but the fame of West is paling in the dawn of a better and a brighter day, and there is nothing in his genius that does not savor more of the decrepitude than the youth of art. He conceived great things, but he never conceived them greatly; neither his mind nor his hand ever rose "to the height of his argument," the most blameless and the most undramatic of painters! Let America be more justly proud that she has given to the world to the two worlds-greater men, whose genius can only "brighten in the blaze of day." I will not speak here of Newton, of Greenough the sculptor, of Cole the admirable landscape painter, of Inman the portrait painter, and others, whose increasing reputation has not yet spread into fame; but of Leslie, yet living among us, one of the most poetical painters of the age, the finest interpreter of the spirit of Shakspeare the world has yet seen, -Leslie, whom England,―deliberately chosen for his dwelling-place, and enriched by his works,may claim as her own; and of ALLSTON, not inferior in genius, and of grandeur of aim and purpose, who died recently in his own land-would that he had died, or at least lived in ours! There was in the mind of this extraordinary man a touch

of the listless and the morbid, which required the spur of generous emulation, of enlightened criticism, of sympathetic praise, to excite him to throw forth the rich creative power of his genius in all its might.

Wilkie used to say, that after receiving one of Sir George Beaumont's critical letters, he always painted with more alacrity for the rest of the day; an artist feels the presence-the enlightening and enlivening power of sympathy, even when it comes in the shape of censure. If the genius of Allston languished in America, certainly it was not for want of patronage so called-it was not for want of praise. The Americans, more particularly those of his own city, were proud of him and his European reputation. Whenever a picture left his easel, there were many to compete for it. They spoke of pictures of Allston which existed in the palaces of English nobles, of Lord Egremont's "Jacob's Dream," of the Duke of Sutherland's "Uriel in the Sun," and they triumphed in the astonishment and admiration of a stranger, who started to find Venetian sentiment, grandeur, and color, in the works of a Boston painter, buried out of sight, almost out of mind, for five-and-twenty years—a whole generation of European amateurs.

Though glorified by his fellow-citizens, and conscious that he had achieved an immortality on earth, it did strike me when I was in Allston's

society, that some inward or outward stimulus to exertion was wanting; that the idea. power had of late years overwhelmed his powers of execution; that the life he was living as an artist was neither a healthy nor a happy life. He dreamed away, or talked away whole hours in his painting-room, but he painted little. He had fallen into a habit which must be perdition to an artist,- -a habit of keeping late hours, sleeping in the morning, and giving much of the night to reading, or to conversation. I heard complaints of his dilatoriness. He said of himself, with a sort of consciousness, and in a deprecating tone, "You must not judge of my industry by the number of pictures I have painted, but the number I have destroyed." In a letter from one of his friends now lying before me, I find a passage alluding to this point, which deserves to be transcribed for its own feeling and beauty, as well as its bearing on the subject. "Often have I rebelled against the unthinking judgments which are sometimes passed upon Allston, because he does not produce more works; he is sometimes called idle; let those who make the charge first try to comprehend the largeness and the fineness of his views of fame." (What these views were we shall see presently in his own words.) "What right have I to sit in judgment upon genius, until I know more of that mysterious organization which, however lawless it may seem to others, is yet a law to itself? this, that, and the other thing I would amend; am I quite sure that in so doing, I should.

not break or mar the whole? We must take genius as it is, and thank it for what it gives us, and thank Heaven for having given us it. How beautifully the intellectual and spiritual part of Allston's nature is blended with his genius as an artist, you have seen and felt; it is the spirit of the man which hallows his works. You once said we had no right to him-that you envied us the poɛsession of such a man. Oh, envy us not!-rob us not of the little we have, which can call off our American mind from the absorbing and hot pursui of vulgar wealth, and the love of perishing things, to those calm contemplations which embody in immortal forms the beautiful and the true!"

Allston has been for so many years absent from England, his merits, even his name, so little known to the present generation of artists and lovers of art in this country, that a sketch of the incidents of his life, before the period of my own personal recollections, may not be unwelcome.*

Washington Allston was a native of South Carolina, and born in 1779. He says of himself, in some notes sent to Mr. Dunlop, that the turn for imitation and composition had shown itself as early as six years old. His delight was to put together

* Most of the facts and dates in the following sketch are taken from "Dunlop's History of the Arts of Design in the United States," a gossiping, tedious, and conceited book; yet, in particular biographies, bearing evident marks of authenticity and sincerity.

miniature landscapes of his own invention, built up with moss, sticks, pebbles, and twigs representing trees; and in manufacturing little men and women out of fern stalks. These childish fancies, he says, "were the straws by which an observer might have guessed which way the current was setting for afterlife. And yet, after all, this love of imitation may be common to childhood. General imitation certainly is but whether adherence to particular kinds may not indicate a permanent propensity, I leave to those who have studied the subject more than I have, to decide."

He adverts to another characteristic: his early passion for the wild, the marvellous, and the terrific, and his delight in the stories of enchantments, hags, and witches, related by his father's negroes. From these sports and influences he was soon torn away-sent to school and college, where he went through the usual course of studies: never relin.quishing the darling pursuit of his childhood, but continuing, unconsciously, the education of his imitative powers. He drew from prints: and before he left school had attempted compositions of his own. "I never," he says, "had any regular instructor in the art (a circumstance, I would observe, both idle and absurd to boast of), but I had much incidental instruction, which I have always, through life, been glad to receive from every one in advance of myself. And I may add, that there is no such thing as a self-taught artist, in the ignorant acceptation of the words; for the greatest genius that