Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/69

66 would have painted of Charles had he been an outside painter.

Sir Peter Lely's flesh-and-blood beauties of Charles the Second's time fill one apartment Hamilton and Mrs. Jameson have given these fair dames an immortality they do not merit They are mere mortal beauties, and not even the best specimens of the kind. They are the women of the coarsest English comedies; not such types of womanhood as Juliet, Desdemona, and Isabella. They have not the merit of individuality. They have all beautiful hands—probably because Sir Peter Lely could paint beautiful hands—and lovely necks and bosoms, most prodigally displayed. There is a mixture of finery and negligence in their dress that would seem to indicate the born slattern transformed into the fine lady. It would take a Mohammed's heaven of such beauties to work up into the spiritual loveliness of an exquisite bead of St. Catharine, by Correggio, in another apartment of this gallery. What a text might be made of these counterfeit presentments of the sinner and the saint for an eloquent preacher in a Magdalen chapel!

Holbein's pictures were to me among the most interesting in the collection. Some one says that Holbein's pictures are "the prose of portrait-painting," the least poetic department of the art. If for "prose" you may substitute truth (and truth, to the apprehension of some people, is mighty prosaic), the remark is just. The truth is so self-evident, the