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From The Athenæum.

--and "after life's fitful fever they sleep well." THE HISTORICAL PORTRAIT GAL- Galileo has long ago risen from his knees be LERY AT THE SYDENHAM PAL- fore the Inquisition, and, in spite of Holy Of

ACE.

fice and red-legged Cardinals, the world still moves round the sun. Tasso has long since left the madman's narrow dungeon at Ferrara for the narrower grave, and Dante has_ere this rejoined his Beatrice in Paradise. Posterity has paid Correggio what his contemporaries refused, and Milton's poems are no longer despised.

A CERTAIN feeling of awe creeps over the mind of the spectator who stays even for a few minutes to muse in these long avenues of the "Pantheon of History." We can now in some degree imagine what a Roman patrician must have felt when he walked through the hall of his fathers and saw the waxen images It does the loiterer good to look around and of his ancestors on either hand; smiling as remember how Time works its revenges, and his fancy might conceive at his virtues or how justice denied by one age is granted by frowning at his vices; and we can now con- another. Here is the proud Torregiano, who ceive the feelings with which an Egyptian broke to pieces the statue he had wrought for monarch may have beheld those embalmed the niggardly hidalgo that refused him his hire, bodies of his predecessors, which had for a and who died forgotten in a Spanish dungeon, thousand years mocked at corruption and the now become a crowned king among men. worm. The unit man looks small amid this Here is the still prouder Michael Angelo, his great multitude of the chosen sons of nature-fellow student, whose nose he broke by an anof those who being dead are yet speaking to gry blow as they were working together, him from the tomb. We feel as if we were modelling an antique statue in the princely pacing some silent desert of a Purgatorial re- garden of the Medici,- that same Angelo gion, surrounded by pale, voiceless faces which something tells us are but the mere vanguard of those shadowy legions which memory can so quickly summon up from their long sleep to repeople earth.

In this Court the dead Painters environ us, from saintly Giotto and Fra Angelico, to Raphael, beautiful as an angel, and Rubens, courteous and lordly as the kings whose courts he visited; the dead Poets hem us in, from Dante, visionary and mournful, to Ariosto, gay and chivalrous;-and the dead Musicians gird us round, from Palestrina, with the high, sad brow, to Mozart, lively as the Viennese who adopted him; and far without, in very distant circles of a lower heaven, are crowding Kings and Warriors, from pious Louis to the thick-lipped Bourbon, from heroic Bayard to the mounteback Murat, and from the falconeyed De Foix to the ill-starred Lannes.

whom a paltry noble compelled in his youth to mould a frail statue of snow in the courtyard, that he might mock his useless labor from his palace window. Where is the sculptor now, and where the noble in the memory of men? Here is the meek Racine, who was slain by an angry look from that blubbercheeked king whom nobody stays to look at, and near him is the satirical Boileau who recorded Louis's glory.

We see again Beethoven in his old age, deaf to all the sounds he loved so much, Haydn, though blind, still groping over the keys of the organ,- Buonarotti, when dim of sight, having the antique torso brought to him that he might feel it, though he could not see its beauty, and Milton, though sightless, writing of the beauties from which he was ever shut out. The groping of these casts in this manner supplies an artificial aid to the A few glances here, and all modern history memory, and all the reading of a life unwinds rises before the eye in conflicting images that itself as we gaze at face after face of these obliterate each other, and shift like the colors dead patriarchs of thought. These are the in a kaleidoscope. As we behold the Austrian conquerors over time and oblivion-(the past beauty of the daughter of Maria Theresa, the is alone indestructible and unreachable by French Revolution "rushes red on the sight," destiny), they whose names are immortal and as we turn to look at the calm austerity and imperishable as long as the human race of the blind Milton, our own Civil War gives survives to extend their conquests and perpetrise to thoughts of the black scaffold and the uate their fame. Let us stop a moment before red axe, of the Whitehall window, and the this cast of David, not King David, but the judgment seat at Westminster. Petrarch, great artist-painter of the French Revolution, dead in his study, recalls Tasso dying at the butcher of the Convention, and the painter Rome while the laurel crown was even then of Napoleon. His face is coarse and brutal,wreathing for him in the Capitol, and Ra- his mouth hideously distorted. He is just the phael, lying in state before his own picture of man you can imagine shouting to his colThe Transfiguration,' reminds us of the sad- leagues, in the language of his own art, "We der scene of Haydon, fallen dead and mangled must grind some more red, as the tumbril before the unfinished creation of his genius. jolted by, with the pikes clashing before it, Peace has come at last to these heroic souls, amid the jeers of the "insulteuses" and the

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HISTORICAL PORTRAIT GALLERY AT SYDENHAM PALACE.

hoarse yelling of the Marseillaise, while the smith, with the perceptive faculties swelling poissardes who reeled after, tossing up their out in a bar above his deep eyes; in short, he red caps to the cry of Ca ira, ca ira, les presents the rough sketch of the noble face aristocrats a la lanterne!" Not far off is which we see realized in his friend and conMadame Dubarry, who once heard those cries temporary, Sebastian del Piombo, whose front that drowned her shrieks as she passed on to the place of death. The unblushing forehead of the quondam milliner-the wife of Le Roue, and the mistress of a king, the harlot in youth and saint in age, who escaped death when she was guilty and suffered when she became innocent is hard, round, small and prominent. Her small, pert, grisette features, slender neck, and full bust, are not very unlike those of Marie Antoinette, except that those little pouting lips have not the Negro-like fullness of the Austrian race; and the gaze is more impudent and wanton, and less capable of being roused into the heroic. She is one neither able to dare nor to suffer.

and beard are like the Phidian Jove, and who might have served Buonarotti as model for his Moses. In all the faces you may discern the truth of the remark, made by that acute observer and good pious visionary Lavater, that the eyebrows of the English and the noses of the French are the chief features of their respective great men. Henry the Fourth, Sully, Montaigne, are all remarkable for the bold, broad-ridged nose, with its dilated_nostrils; and Shakspeare, Bacon, Newton, have all the low, full, meditative eyebrows, the very reverse of the fantastic, high-arched, wandering ones of Francis the First. "Non cuique datum est habere nasum " (it is not The casts are divided into four sections; given to every one to have a nose), says the English, the French, the German, and the Lavater plaintively, forgetting that to some Italian. The first abounds chiefly with illus- the gods grant too much nose, as he might trious moderns; the French with the illuminati have seen in a moment in the looking-glass. of the "Grand Monarque" and Revolutionary The Painters form here an interesting series: periods, and with a fair sprinkling of the-from the monastic, calm, pious contemplaearlier kings; the German includes their tive faces of Fra Angelico and Masaccio, with chief poets and philosophers, and many of the more recent statesmen; and the Italian is rich in the old painters, and comprises a few poets and dramatists.

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whom painting was rather an aspiration and a religious duty than a trade,-to the solemn, aristocratic Venetians, who became rich and ennobled by their art, and the great men who The ugliest of all ancient and modern great pursued art as a passion, like Michael Angelo, men seem Galileo, Socrates, and Pitt; Machi- the Barseker, and Raphael, sweet-eyed and avelli and Calhoun coming in a good second. saintly, and so on to the full-blooded, vigor Galileo, like Socrates, has a short, thick, fleshy ous Flemings, with whom Art was both a trade nose, long upper lip, and prominent cheek- and a dignity, but not a religion. How we bones;-Socrates, not unlike a vulgar Silenus, group them together when we think of Titian was accustomed to say that his face, in spite visited by Michael Angelo, the friend of Raof the apparent contradiction, was a great phel and Giulio Romano; or of Velasquez argument in favor of physiognomy, for that walking at night with Claude and Poussin on by nature he had all those bad passions that the rampart at Rome, while Guido was painthis features indicated, but wisdom had taught ing his "Aurora" in the same city, and Alhim to subdue them. Pitt has a bowsprit of a bano too was there not idle; or we see Ru nose, a pert hook-shaped appendage, on which bens, a very king among painters, busy at his his enemies used to say, "he dangled the "Descent from the Cross," while robust JorOpposition," the most unpromising nose that daens and Snyders, Brauwer and young Te genius ever blew. Machiavelli is a small, niers are looking on. Here is Giotto, whom wizen, and tight-skinned looking Jesuit, with Cimabue took from tending sheep; and the the cold cunning ferocity of a wild-cat hidden Carracci, the sons of a poor tailor, like Andrea beneath the white-floured skin of a priest. del Sarto; and here is the slow, sure-witted Calhoun is a gaunt, emaciated giant, like a Domenicheno, whom the savage cutthroat consumptive back woodsman, and his angular Spagnoletto persecuted to death; and Guido, features seem worked by the external machine- the Carracci's pupil, who escaped with difficul ry of those whipcord veins and that shrivelled ty the same fate only to die more miserably cordage of muscles that hang like loose rigging than Correggio. We see here those enthu about his hollow-eyed visage. The great siasts to whom Art was all in all,-who sat beMichael Angelo, too, in spite of his pure aspi-side the galley slaves as they toiled, to watch rations and noble extraction, appears scarcely the straining muscles, and who exposed themmore comely than the illustrious men here selves to the risk of shipwreck for the sake of selected for their pre-eminence in ugliness. a marine effect.

He has a heavy brow, coarse, blunt, almost Among the great Composers we see the savage face of a bullying stone-mason, and the usual peculiarity of the physiognomy, followprotruding cheek-bones of a highland black-ing the changes of a century. Palestrina is

sneer, with his hollow piercing eyes, projecting under lip, and pointed chin:-Descartes, wild, furrowed, and haggard,-the most imaginative looking of severe thinkers; who explained creation by the most absurd and poetical of hypotheses, and convinced himself that there was a God by the most daring of specu lations. Here is Sully, the very model of a statesman; grave, wise, and thoughtful, strangely contrasted with the fixed stony faces and compressed lips of such modern diplomatists as Manteufel and Von Stein.

austere and calm; Cimarosa sensual and fat; | faces of its kings. In crowned murderer and Hydn has a little of the petit-maitre about him; crowned adulterer you may trace every gradabut the democratic Beethoven, whom he pro- tion of human criminality and human folly, phesied would turn out a mere pianist, looks from the lust and vanity of Francis the First sublime, with his deep eyes, suffering face, and to the blood-sucking fanaticism of Charles the hair like a wild beast's mane. Ninth,-the inflated greed of Louis the Four There are several casts here of the Cæsar-teenth, and the refined degradation of Louis like head of Napoleon,-the very type of Quinze. Here is Louis the Eleventh,―his. dominion and serene, cold, imperturbable wrinkled face drawn down with superstitious wisdom; but Canova's and Thorwaldsen's terror, and wrung by fear rather than by rebusts, though both grand and calm, fail in pentance,-Henry the Fourth, bold and sagapoint of actual portraiture when compared cious; but unprincipled, vain, and lewd,with the miniatures of Isabet, or the leonine Charles the Ninth, a sort of royal pickpocket, faces that Delaroche and David have painted. with a hang-dog, Jack Sheppard face, more In Isabet you trace the great Corsican, from fit for the galley bench than the seat of state,the pale, cynical, melancholy young officer of Francis the First, headstrong and weak,artillery, and the grave, conscious dignity of Louis the Twelfth, ugly and heartless, in spite the Consul, to the unhealthy and flabby fea- of Brantome's opinion that he had " un visage tures of the latter Emperor, when, as Lamar- doux et bon," and Louis the Fifteenth, with his tine says, his face appeared as if gilded by the retreating forehead, fleshy jowl, and sensual bile that tinged his blood, and when his head under lip. habitually hung down, like Wordsworth's, Behind these come a crowd of illustrious heavy with trance-like meditation, and "le Frenchmen. Voltaire-the incarnation of a petit caporal" of the Fantassins had become, in the soldier's language, "le père pensif" of the Old Guard. Round this eagle cluster the eaglets. Here are all the Marshals, whom his keen eye detected, like Alexander, in every rank of life:-Murat, the landlord's son; Junot and Ney, the poor privates; Bernadotte, the brave sergeant; Massena, the vinter's boy; and Kleber, the young architect. Here too, is Hoche, the stable-boy, who once dared to land in Ireland; Moreau, the renegade, and Desaix, whom Bonaparte wept for at Marengo; and Lannes, whose mind, he said, was Of the antique casts we have no room to continually growing, and who resembled an speak. It is singular to observe that when the old Roman rather than a French marshal. Greek strove to convey a low type of humanOf this invincible band few were native ity, as in the Faun or Silenus, its face has Frenchmen. Junot was a Swiss, Macdonald European analogies. The Roman heads rea Scotchman, and Kellerman and Kleber were semble ours in many respects; and the deprav Germans. Here is Kleber, whom Napoleon ed women of the Imperial times, as Faustina, said sometimes slept, but when he awoke it Agrippina, etc., have the hard round forehead was the awakening of the lion,-looking eager and small weak chin which became the marked as if trying to pierce the battle-smoke, up- feature of the Louis Quinze age, or may be raised like a Vulcan starting from his forge; traced in the sleepy-eyed, languid beauties of -Hoche, handsome as Murat, and less theat- Lely and of Kneller. It is impossible to deny rical than that "King Franconi";-and Mar- that every century seems to have impressed ceau, proud, beautiful, and cruel as a Catiline. its peculiar crimes and virtues, and its hopes The Poets muster strong, and elbow the and struggles, on the faces of its great men. very kings who let them starve. Here is that The Elizabethan face is finely oval; the eyes Corneille, whom Racine petitioned for so meditative, the forehead high and arched, and warmly; and who, nevertheless, died in pov- the chin firm and well rounded. The George erty and neglect, while France was still read-the Second visage is fleshy and full, the chin ing the "Cid" with wonder and delight. Here small and fat, the lower jaw heavy, the neck is Tasso, sad-eyed, but calm,-Ariosto, viva- thick, and the cheeks full and furrowed. The cious and wild, and Dante, thin-cheeked and fifteenth century forehead is square, - the suffering,-Metastasio, the boy who was found seventeenth, round, the thirteenth, flat and a poor improvisatore in the streets, now full wide, the eighteenth, full and swelling over wigged and heavy jowled,-Petrarch, digni- the eyes. We believe that in the present day fied and majestic, and Goldoni, intelligent a better type of physiogomy is beginning to and acute. appear: the face grows more oval, the foreOne may read a nation's history here in the head higher and fuller, the lips smaller and

firmer, the nose nobler and straighter. Napo-less materialism. A pure school of poetry leon's was a model for a head,-Byron, Shel- has arisen, drawing its images direct from ley, Southey, Wordsworth, and Keats were Nature, and appealing to the common heart. spiritual and handsome. Most of our living A school of painting has sprung up side by authors present much more of the Elizabethan side, originating from it, and likely to rival it type. Refinement of manners is already per- in renown. With the peaked beard vanished ceptible on the national features. Club life chivalry,-with the full-bottomed wig Renaismay be as selfish as tavern life, but it is purer sance poetry, and with the revival of a taste and healthier. There is more religion now for Gothic Art is now coming back all that and more decorum,-more earnestness and was worthy of preservation in the Middle Ages.

From The Spectator.

EVENINGS IN MY TENT.*

Mr. Davis a penetrating acumen or a very graphic power. He belongs too completely to a missionary school, with its small views of things, and its mannerism of thought and style. When there is character in an incident, a scene, or an anecdote, he may be able to pre serve it; but he wants vigorous power and artist-like skill to bring before his reader the everyday life and appearance of the Tunisian territory, fresh and remarkable as they often seem to be.

Some space is given to reports of controversial dialogues between Mohammedans and Jews; the latter being mostly in a wretched state of ignorance. There are sketches of manners really interesting, as the following account of divorce.

The

THE principal subject of Evenings in My Tent, (which seems to take its title from the place of its composition,) is travels through Tunis, performed under more advantageous circumstances than_generally attended the African explorer. The heir apparent to the throne made a sort of military and fiscal progress into the interior as far as Neftah, in latitude 33 S. longitude about 8 E.; and the Reverend Mr. Davis accompanied him as one of his suite. Though Tunis is the site of Carthage and other ancient to vns, and exhibits the Moorish and Arab manners in a less adultered state than the neighboring territory of Algiers, the region is probably more remarkable in its associations than in itself. We sus- lies was such as to induce me to believe that "My first impression on visiting several famipect, however, that Mr. Davis is not altogether greater domestic happiness prevailed here than fitted to travel advantageously, so far as a in the Mohammedan cities on the coast. narrative of his travels is concerned. He has females are not kept in distinct and separate long been familiar with the Orientals, not only apartments; nor do they even cover their faces in Barbary but in Syria, apparently as a mis- when in the presence of strangers, but appear sionary. He is versed in Arabic and other perfectly free, and seem exceedingly affable. Eastern tongues, and skilled in controversy, But, though free from restrictions of this kind, which Mohammedans rather affect. The cir-I soon discovered that domestic happiness was cumstances under which he travelled were nevertheless marred, and that Mohammedan fevery favorable. The cortége of Sidi Moham- males had, even here, cause to groan under the med Bey rather resembled an ancient patri- Discord, contention, and strife, have their sway corrupt legislation of the Prophet of Mecca. archal movement than the march of a modern here, and that principally the result of the licenarmy in our sense; so that while the patron- tious and unnatural system of polygamy. age of the Bey-"a most enlightened man "When on the coast, I had frequently occagave the traveller security and facilities of sion to see the evil resulting from this portion observation, it enabled him to study Eastern of Mohammed's legislation. Families are often life as exhibited in the emigration of tribes or broken up, ties of the most sacred character are peoples. Something of this, as well as of severed, and animosity and hatred may be seen Moorish and Arab manners and character, prevailing where harmony and love ought to is preserved in Mr. Davis's reign. The trivial causes which justify a divorce, pages. There are and the facility with which the same may be prostriking pictures on the march, in the camp, cured, must be regarded as intimately connected and in the so-called towns. The reader who with that baneful system. To illustrate this, I carefully peruses Evenings in My Tent to ex- have simply to narrate an anecdote in which I tract from it the information which it contains, myself have played a very prominent part. will be able to draw from it a good deal of matter. This information, however, is mixed up with much that is trivial, or of slender relation to the immediate subject, or uninteresting and verbose. Nature has not given to

* By the Rev. N. Davis, F. R. S. S. A.

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"A servant of mine, of the name of Ali, once very pressingly applied for leave to go out for a short time. It was not my custom to inquire into the nature of his business; but on that oocasion something unaccountable prompted me to put the question, " And where are you going to, Ali?"

"Holding up a piece of paper, he very coolly

answered, "To give my wife this divorce; and
shall soon be back, Arfi-my master."
"To give your wife a divorce! Well, you
may go; but remember, if you divorce her, I
from this very moment divorce you.'

Handing me the paper, Ali exclaimed, 'Here, master, take it! on such conditions I shall not divorce my wife.'

"The following is my translation of the divorce, the cost of which is only a few pence"Praise to God! Ali Ben Salem Suri, from Soof, of the tribe of Sakim, one of the porters of Bab Almanorah, divorced his wife, the chaste Buka, the daughter of Chami, of the same tribe, of the sons of my Lord Ann. This divorce is the first she has from this husband, according to

their confession. She was present [before the notary] when he returned to her the contract of marriage and the rest of her dowry. He also pays her expenses for the time fixed in which she cannot be married to another, [four months,] also the house-rent during the above-mentioned time, and all other things of the same nature. They agreed that she is to give him, for the purpose of being delivered from him, one hundred piastres (about £3 10s.) current money. This sum she will pay in two instalments; now fifty, and the other fifty after four months, if she lives. She confessed that she is not in the family way, nor does she even doubt of being so. Upon such

conditions she was divorced.

"That the above parties were in their perfect senses on the ninth of the month Alkadi, (the respected,) of the year five and fifty, and two hundred and one thousand, (of the Hejira,) is certified by

"The humble of the Lord, AHMED, son of

Ali Almakbi;

"And by MOHAMMED ALHANNAH.

into their unknown graves, shall endure for ages on ages. It cannot be removed or altered; it rests for ever there. The vast temple-columns shall not be transplanted; the sculptured giants shall sit supporting the rock they are carved from while there remains a rock to support.Spectator.

AN INCIDENT IN ATLANTIC STEAMING.

The following narrative of danger and preservation is related by a passenger on board a steamer which recently performed the voyage from Liverpool to New York :-"For the first three days we had very bad weather, but it soon afterwards moderated, and we continued on our way without accident till we run into a dense fog on the banks of Newfoundland. Believing that we were clear, and, indeed, far to the southward of the ice, the captain was going full instead of slow speed, as is usual on the banks, when all at once, right before us, and within 100 yards of our bows, a gigantic iceberg was looming in the mist. The top was considerably higher than the topgallant yard, and it covered as far as we could see, passThe captain looked as if he had been struck in ing it quickly as we did, a large extent of water. the face, and, though his lips moved, he could not speak to give the necessary orders. But the second mate, who was there, shouted to the men at the wheel as if he would crack his voice, and

all the passengers, who rushed on deck in a moment at the first alarm, took it up. A moment

more-ten seconds more-and our bows would have been flattened to the foremast, for we were going nearly thirteen knots an hour; but we just cleared it. The paddle-box was within twelve feet of it; one could easily have jumped upon it. Some of the ladies fainted with the fright,

"The help of God be upon all! By His but, though we went slow for about an hour, dur

favor. Amen.'"

The thought which the Egyptians derived from Nature most absorbingly, and expressed most distinctly, was that of repose. To their eyes, assuredly, Nature was not "a perpetual flux," but a perpetual endeavor towards rest. The endeavor was the dust of the race, the repose its crown.

"Rest, rest, for ever rest,

Spread over brow and breast:
Her face is toward the West,
The purple land."

Monotony is one feature of repose; and the
Egyptians have it. The ruling sentiment re-
sides in a single seated figure, the legs straight,
fixed, and identical, the hands spread on the
knees, the head poised without either raising or
depression, the eyes set forward; but it resides
far more than fiftyfold in fifty such figures. The
huge mass and colossal scale of Egyptian art are
another feature of repose, forming in themselves
a characteristic nationally distinctive, yet still
subordinate in expression to the leading thought.
The pyramid, the labor of whose building has
consumed years and ground down thousands

ing which time we saw two other bergs, you will hardly believe that at the end of that time, just as night set in, with a fog still on the water so thick that, standing on deck, you could not see the light on the foremast head. the captain went on full speed again, and did not slacken all night. There was very nearly a mutiny among the passengers. Some of them were captains of ships trading in these scas themselves, and they all unanimously condemned it. Of course no one can presume even to speak to a captain in his own ship about what he chooses to do, but his own officers were as nervous as we. We had prayers in the cabin for the passengers and crew, to return thanks for our preservation, and during the whole of that night I fancy many people said prayers that perhaps never did before. I never, for my part, passed such a night in my life, at least till I went asleep, at about twelve or half-past. Most of the passengers and crew were collected in little knots, discussing our chance of escape, and there were we crashing on through mist and darkness with the chance of going at any moment into an invisible iceberg— in which case, as the captain afterwards admitted, we should have been down in five minutes without a chance of any of us being heard of again."-The Press.

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