places Murillo by the side of Raphael.”

The lover of painting has but few opportunities of studying the Spanish school in England. At Paris and at Munich the means are more at hand. In England, it is principally to the Sutherland Gallery that he must have recourse. That gallery possesses five pictures by Murillo, one of which is an acknowledged masterpiece of art. Four pictures by Zurbaran, one by Alonzo Cano, one by Spagnoletto, and one by Velasquez.

At Dulwich are several pictures by the hand of Murillo; at Grosvenor House is the celebrated landscape formerly in the palace of St. Jago, at Madrid; at Lord Ashburton's are four of his works, one of which represents "St. Thomas of Villa Neve, when a Child, distributing Alms."

At Mr. Wells', at Redleaf, is a very fine picture by Murillo, that was formerly in a church at Genoa ; it also represents "St. Thomas of Villa Neve relieving the Sick."

At Longford Castle, in Wiltshire, are two fine Murillos, along with some excellent specimens of Velasquez; at the Duke of Wellington's are several of the Spanish school; at Lord Lansdowne's is a curious picture of El Mudo (Navarete), a rare Spanish painter, as well as several works by the hands of Velasquez and Murillo; at Mr. Sanderson's is one Murillo; at Leigh Court, near Bristol, are three fine Murillos; at Lord Shrewsbury's are two, on sacred subjects; at Burleigh, one picture; at Woburn, one picture: and the above mostly comprise the whole of Murillo works to be found in England.

With regard to the number of his productions, Murillo is only to be rivalled by his countryman, Lopez di Vega. Like that poet, his youth was but of little use to him; like him he laboured the rest of his life, and in his own line equalled the 1800 comedias, the 400 autos sacramentales, the epic and the burlesque poems, the sonnets, the stories, which made Cervantes call Lopez "a monster in nature;" unlike his master Velasquez, Murillo repeated his subjects often. Velasquez gave a care to every one of his paintings, all being intended for his king and mas

ter, while Murillo's works, destined to become the property of various persons in different parts of Spain, were often repetitions, and thus he became his own plagiarist.

Velasquez was most at home in common life in an adherence to truth to nature, while Murillo's greater energy, and more brilliant imagination, loved to soar above real life, though not like Zurbaran or Morales, whose powers are in terror and gloom, who revel in penance, in superstition, in autos de fè, the scenes of the Inquisition, and the ecstasies of Loyola.

The fine arts are proved to be passions in hundreds of instances, and like passion wholly and entirely lay hold of the mind of man; and when this is the case, the picture partakes of the character of the artist. There are many instances amongst artists of death occurring from grief, disappointment, jealousy, and envy, and particularly in Spain: amongst these examples is that of Castillo, a native of Cordova. He came to Seville in 1666, when Murillo was at the height of his reputation; and on looking at his productions, which he did with great astonishment, he saw Nature reflected in her most perfect shape, with a brilliancy that he knew he could not emulate, nor had he believed in the power of art to attain. At length he recovered his speech, but only to exclaim, Yà muriro Castillo !" (Castillo is no more.) He returned to his home, but never again to paint.

а

66

Castillo was a poet as well as a painter. Seized with a hopeless gloom, he lived a short time in a state of despair, dying of a broken spirit, proving that there are natures endowed with such susceptible passions, that to take away hope is to take away life.

It has been written that Murillo was a stranger both to interest and to ambition. It was in 1670, when Murillo must have been about the age of fifty-seven, that one of his paintings was carried in procession at Madrid, at the festival of Corpus Christi. The subject was “The Immaculate Conception ;" and the picture made such a sensation at Madrid, and at court, that the king's impatience would brook no delay, and he sent for Murillo from Seville;

but the love of ease and retirement of the painter was not to be conquered by ambition or honours. He refused the commands of his sovereign under various pretences, and continued to live on at Seville in independence, that is, in constant labour and study of his art. Pictures were, however, sent by him to the royal collection.

But Murillo was not so totally engrossed with his art as to forget others. With the aid of his artistfriends, and the public authorities, he established an academy at Seville, of which he became director. It was opened in 1660, at a time of public rejoicing in Spain, at the peace of the Pyrenees and the marriage of Louis XIV. to the Infanta MariaTheresa. Neither in this work nor in any other did Murillo receive any assistance from his own family. His eldest son went to the West Indies as a merchant; his second son became a canon of the cathedral at Seville; and his daughter took the veil in the convent of the Madrè de Dios.

In 1681 Murillo went to Cadiz to paint the altar-piece of "The Marriage of St. Catherine," for the Convent of Capuchins; he fell from a scaffolding erected near the painting, was much hurt, and returned to his home at Seville, ill, in consequence of his fall. After lingering for some time he died in April, 1682, and was buried in a vault in the church of

Santa Cruz, under the chapel where is the painting of "The Descent from the Cross," by Pietro Campana, and where Murillo was accustomed to pass some part of each day in prayer and meditation. This magnificent picture had been ever the object of Murillo's admiration and reverence throughout his life. And in that same chapel where so many holy thoughts had entranced him, in the same spot where his mind had ever been intent on religious meditations and feelings, his body found a resting-place. There is a harmony and a peace in the whole of Murillo's life and death, very powerful in his religious and poetical life; and in him is found a painter, as Wordsworth is a poet.

It is related, that one day when the church-doors were about to be closed towards evening, the sacristan reminded Murillo, then in meditation before his favourite picture, that it was time to depart. "I wait," said Murillo, still in his ecstasy, "I wait until these holy persons have taken away the body of our Lord."

After Murillo's death, it was discovered how entirely disinterested his life and character had been. No further fortune did he possess than a hundred reals, that he had received the day before he died; and that money, with sixty ducats found in a drawer, comprised the whole of his earthly possessions.

THE character of Gruff-and-Tackleton, in Mr. Dickens's last Christmas story, has always appeared to me a great and painful blot upon that otherwise charming performance. Surely it is impossible that a man whose life is passed in the making of toys, hoops, whirligigs, theatres, dolls, jack-in-boxes, and ingenious knickknacks for little children, should be a savage at heart, a child-hater by nature, and an ogre by disposition. How could such a fellow succeed in his trade? The practice of it would be sufficient to break that black heart of his outright. Invention to such a person would be impossible; and the continual exercise of his profession, the making of toys which he despised for little beings whom he hated, would, I should think, become so intolerable to a Gruff-and-Tackleton, that he would be sure to fly for resource to the first skipping-rope at hand, or to run himself through his dura ilia with a tin sabre. The ruffian! the child - hating Herod! a squadron of rocking-horses ought to trample and crush such a fellow into smaller particles of flint. I declare for my part I hate Gruff-and-Tackleton worse than any ogre in Mother Bunch. Ogres have been a good deal maligned. They eat children, it is true, but only occasionally,-children of a race which is hostile to their Titanic progeny; they are good enough to their own young. Witness the ogre in Hopomythumb, who gave his seven daughters seven crowns, the which Hopomythumb stole for his brothers, and a thousand other instances in fairy history. This is parenthetic, however. The proposition is, that makers of children's toys may have their errors, it is true, but must be, in the main, honest and kindly-hearted persons.

I wish Mrs. Marcet, the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, or any other person possessing universal knowledge, would take a toy and

child's emporium in hand, and explain to us all the geographical and historical wonders it contains. That Noah's ark, with its varied contents, - its leopards and lions, with glued pump-handled tails; its light-blue elephants and footed ducks; that ark containing the cylindrical family of the patriarch was fashioned in Holland, most likely, by some kind pipe-smoking friends of youth by the side of a slimy canal. A peasant in a Danubian pine-wood carved that extraordinary nutcracker, who was painted up at Nuremberg afterwards in the costume of a hideous hussar. That little fir lion, more like his roaring original than the lion at Barnet, or the lion of Northumberland House, was cut by a Swiss shepherd boy tending his goats on a mountain-side, where the chamois were jumping about in their untanned leather. I have seen a little Mahometan on the Etmeidan at Constantinople, twiddling about just such a whirligig as you may behold any day in the hands of a small Parisian in the Tuileries Gardens. And as with the toys so with the toy-books. They exist every where; there is no calculating the distance through which the stories come to us, the number of languages through which they have been filtered, or the centuries during which they have been told. Many of them have been narrated, almost in their present shape, for thousands of years since, to little copper-coloured Sanscrit children, listening to their mother under the palm-trees by the banks of the yellow Jumna-their Brahmin mother, who softly narrated them through the ring in her nose. The very same tale has been heard by the Northmen Vikings as they lay on their shields on deck; and by the Arabs, couched under the stars on the Syrian plains when the flocks were gathered in, and the mares were picketted by the tents. With regard

to the story of Cinderella, I have heard the late Thomas Hill say that he remembered to have heard, two years before Richard Coeur de Lion came back from Palestine, a Norman jongleur-but, in a word, there is no end to the antiquity of these tales, a dissertation on which would be quite needless and impossible here.

One cannot help fooking with a secret envy on the children of the present day, for whose use and entertainment a thousand ingenious and beautiful things are provided which were quite unknown some few scores of years since, when the present writer and reader were very possibly in the nursery state. Abominable attempts were made in those days to make useful books for children, and cram science down their throats as calomel used to be administered under the pretence of a spoonful of currantjelly. Such picture-books as we had were illustrated with the most shameful, hideous, old wood-cuts which had lasted through a century, and some of which may be actually seen lingering about still as head-pieces to the Catnach ballads, in those rare corners of the town where the Catnach ballads continue to be visible. Some painted pictures there were in our time likewise, but almost all of the very worst kind; the hideous distortions of Rowlandson, who peopled the picture-books with bloated parsons in periwigs, tipsy aldermen and leering salacious nymphs, horrid to look at. Tom and Jerry followed, with choice scenes from the Cockpit, the Round House, and Drury Lane. Atkins's slang sporting subjects then ensued, of which the upsetting of Charleys' watch-boxes, leaping fivebarred gates, fighting duels with amazing long pistols, and kissing short waisted damsels in pink spencers, formed the chief fun. The first real, kindly agreeable, and infinitely amusing and charming illustrations for a child's book in England which I know, were those of the patriarch George Cruikshank, devised for the famous German popular stories. These were translated by a certain magistrate of Bow Street, whom the Examiner is continually abusing, but whose name ought always to be treated tenderly on account of that great service which he did to the nation. Beauty, fun, and

fancy, were united, in these admirable designs. They have been copied all over Europe. From the day of their appearance, the happiness of children may be said to have increased immeasurably. After Cruikshank, the German artists, a kindly and goodnatured race, with the organ of philoprogenitiveness strongly developed, began to exert their wits for children. Otto Speckter, Neureuther, the Dusseldorf school, the book-designers at Leipsig and Berlin, the mystical and tender-hearted Overbeck, and numberless others, have contributed to the pleasure and instruction of their little countrymen. In France the movement has not been so remarkable. The designers in the last twenty years have multiplied a hundred-fold: their talent is undeniable: but they have commonly such an unfortunate penchant for what is wrong, that the poor little children can hardly be admitted into their company. They cannot be benefited by voluptuous pictures illustrative of Balzac, Béranger, Manon-Lescaut, and the like. The admirable Charlet confined himself to war and battle, and les gloires de la France chiefly: the brilliant designs of Vernet and Raffet are likewise almost all military. Gavarni, the wittiest and cleverest designer that ever lived probably, depicts grisettes, Ste. Pélagie, bals-masqués, and other subjects of town-life and intrigue, quite unfit for children's edification. The caustic Granville, that Swift of the pencil, dealt in subjects scarcely more suited to children than the foul satires of the wicked old Cynic of St. Patrick's, whose jokes to my mind are like the fun of a demon; and whose best excuse is Swift's Hospital.

In England the race of designers is flourishing and increasing; and the art as applied to the nursery (and where, if you please, you who sneer, has our affectionate Mother Art a better place?), has plenty of practitioners and patronage. Perhaps there may be one or two of our readers who have heard of an obscure publication called Punch, a hebdomadal miscellany, filled with drawings and jokes, good or bad. Of the artists engaged upon this unfortunate periodical, the chief are Messrs. Leech and Doyle, both persons, I would wager, remark

able for love of children, and daily giving proofs of this gentle disposition. Whenever Mr. Leech, "in the course of his professional career," has occasion to depict a child by the side of a bottle-nosed alderman, a bow-waistcoated John Bull, a policeman, a Brook-Green Volunteer, or the like, his rough, grotesque, rollicking pencil becomes gentle all of a sudden, he at once falls into the softest and tenderest of moods, and dandles and caresses the infant under his hands, as I have seen a huge whiskered grenadier do in St. James's Park, when mayhap (but this observation goes for nothing), the nursemaid chances to be pretty. Look at the picture of the Eton-boy dining with his father, and saying, "Governor, one toast before we go-the ladies!" This picture is so pretty, and so like, that it is a positive fact, that every father of an Eton-boy declares it to be the portrait of his own particular offspring. In the great poem of "the Brook-Green Volunteer," cantos of which are issuing weekly from the Punch press; all the infantine episodes, without exception, are charming; and the volunteer's wife such a delightful hint of black-eyed smiling innocence and prettiness, as shews that beauty is always lying in the heart of this humorist,-this good humorist, as he assuredly must be. As for Mr. Doyle, his praises have been sung in this Magazine already and his pencil every day gives far better proofs of his genuine relish for the grotesque and beautiful than any that can be produced by the pen of the present writer.

The real heroes of this article, however, who are at length introduced after the foregoing preliminary flourish,are, Mr. Joseph Cundall, of 12 Old Bond Street, in the city of Westminster, publisher; Mr. Felix Summerly, of the Home Treasury-office; Mrs. Harriet Myrtle; Ambrose Merton, Gent., the editor of Gammer Gurton's Story Books; the writer (or writers) of the Good-natured Bear, The Story-Book of Holyday Hours, &c., and the band of artists who have illustrated for the benefit of youth these delightful works of fiction. Their names are Webster, Townshend, Absolon, Cope, Horsley, Redgrave, H. Corbould, Franklin,

and Frederick Tayler,-names all famous in art; nor surely could artists ever be more amiably employed than in exercising their genius in behalf of young people. Fielding, I think, mentions with praise the name of Mr. Newbery, of Saint Paul's Churchyard, as the provider of storybooks and pictures for children in his day. As there is no person of the late Mr. Fielding's powers writing in this Magazine, let me be permitted, humbly, to move a vote of thanks to the meritorious Mr. Joseph Cundall.

The mere sight of the little books published by Mr. Cundall-of which some thirty now lie upon my tableis as good as a nosegay. Their actual covers are as brilliant as a bed of tulips, and blaze with emerald, and orange, and cobalt, and gold, and crimson. I envy the feelings of the young person for whom (after having undergone a previous critical examination) this collection of treasures is destined. Here are fairy tales, at last, with real pictures to them. What a library!-what a picture-gallery! Which to take up first is the puzzle. I can fancy that perplexity and terror seizing upon the small individual to whom all these books will go in a parcel, when the string is cut, and the brown paper is unfolded, and all these delights appear. Let us take out one at hazard it is the

:

HISTORY OF TOM HICKATHRIFT THE CONQUEROR."

Did

He is bound in blue and gold: in the picture Mr. Frederick Tayler has represented Tom and a friend slaughtering wild beasts with prodigious ferocity. Who was Tom Hickathrift the Conqueror? you ever hear of him? Fielding mentions him somewhere, too; but his history has passed away out of the nursery annals, and this is the first time his deeds have ever come under my cognisance. Did Fielding himself write the book? The style is very like that of the author of Joseph Andrews. Tom lived in the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, the story says, in the reign of William the Conqueror; his father, who was a labourer, being dead, "and his mother being tender of their son, maintained him by her own labour as well