Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/252

516 The year 1840 was signalized in Scott's life by the exhibition of his terrible painting, which he had executed at Rome, under the title of "Agony of Discord, or the Household Gods Destroyed," and over which he exclaimed, when it was finished, "That is the work I must live by!" The figures of this strange myth are scarcely human, or if human, at least pre-adamite, when stature, and strength, and passionate expression may be supposed by a poet or artist to have far transcended the present type of humanity; while over them towers a colossal Lacoon-like form, exhausted in the struggle, and about to sink with crushing downfall upon those members of the rebellious home with whom he has been contending to the last. In the midst of this wild strife, the mother has thrown her infant upon the floor; the household altar is overturned, and the household god broken. It was the impersonation, in a single tremendous scene, of the continual strife and struggle of humanity in its path of progress from age to age; and therefore fraught, in every part, with deep and hidden meaning, which nothing but careful examination could detect, and anxious study comprehend. Of course, it was "caviare to the multitude," who gazed helplessly upon it, and shook their heads: it was such also to not a few of those penny-a-line critics whom our provincial journals extemporize for the nonce, to fill up a column with a "Report of the Exhibition," and whose whole stock consists of a few terms of art, which they sow at random over their paragraphs. But was it not thus at first with "Paradise Lost" and the "Excursion;" or, to come nearer to the comparison, with "Christabelle" and the "Ancient Mariner?" The highest excellence is slowly appreciated, and thus it fared with Scott's "Discord;" but who would now venture to criticize it in the style that was used in 1840? At the same exhibition were Scott's "Philoctetes left in the Isle of Lemnos by the Greeks, in their Passage towards Troy," a painting also finished during his stay in Rome; "Cupid sharpening his Arrows," and "The Crucifixion."

In 1841 Scott sent to the exhibition "Queen Elizabeth in the Globe Theatre," "Queen Mary receiving the Warrant for her Execution," "The Death of Jane Shore," "Ave Maria," and "A Parthian Archer." In "The Globe Theatre," which was a painting of large dimensions and plentiful detail, there were, besides the audience, draped and arranged in the fashion of the period, the virgin queen herself, listening to the "Merry Wives of Windsor," which had been written at her desire its still more illustrious author and Spenser, Fletcher, Saekville, Ben Johnson, and other towering spirits of the age, with whom Shakspeare was wont to wage such glorious conflicts of wit at their meetings in the Mermaid.

In 1842 Scott exhibited "The Duke of Gloucester taken into the Water Gate of Calais," "Silenus praising Wine," and "The Challenge." At the commencement of this year also, being excited to the task by the proposal of painting the new houses of parliament with designs in fresco, he published a pamphlet, entitled "British, French, and German Painting." At the close of this year he likewise exhibited, on his own account, in the Calton Hill Rooms, his large picture of " Vasco de Gama, the Discoverer of the New Passage to India, encountering the Spirit of the Storm while attempting to double the Cape of Good Hope," but at that time known as Capo Tormentoso. Magnificent though the original conception is in the "Lusiad" of Camoens, it falls greatly short of its illustration by the painterand how seldom can this be said of imitation, whether in poetry or painting! The terrible apparition of the " stormy Spirit of the Cape," whose frown itself seems enough to annihilate a navy the daring