Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/32

, Mr. Maclise can depict light vastly better than this when he chooses. So much for objections. After any quantity of them, it remains that the picture is highly attractive, and the Madeline a very beautiful creature—perhaps the sweetest woman Mr. Maclise has painted. She is a personage not made

and yet she is sympathetic. To be that, she must be poetic also.

589. —Measure for Measure.—Mr. Burchett follows up his remarkable work of last year with another of corresponding importance. Matured consideration, and strong powers of working and of development, have gone to the making of this picture; which represents the great crisis in the action of Measure for Measure, where the Duke of Vienna, disguised as a friar, is revealed by the unwitting Lucio to the eyes of the abashed Angelo and Escalus, and of the now almost hopeless Isabella and Mariana. The story is told with much judgment and penetration (so far as such a complicated story can be told) by the Duke's vacated chair of state, with coronet and sceptre laid upon it, between the seats of Escalus and Angelo; the young courtier, facing the just uncowled Duke, and recognising him on the instant, and raising his cap; the frothy bluster of Lucio dying out on his scared visage as he gasps to see whom he has been mauling and traducing; and other well-chosen and well-combined incidents. The countenance of the Duke is German and searching; that of Escalus true to the good-natured cynicism of the substantially upright old man; Isabella has much of the nun about her. Angelo is, I think, too much the burly insolent oppressor; for we must understand from the drama that he really looked and was an Abstinent Pharisee, led on by temptation and opportunity into vilenesses quite unlike the man that all others and himself supposed him to be. There is much able and accurate painting in this work, though it would benefit by more breadth of general harmonizing.

600. —The Wayfarer.—A peculiar and delicate piece of subdued execution, deserving of inspection; so peculiar in its