several weeks, and received a reasonable, though rather moderate, share of the public patronage. Compared with similar exhibitions in the great cities of Europe, this display of good taste, by a Boston Merchant is not perhaps entitled to particular notice; but, compared with everything of the sort, before seen in our goodly city, we hold it to be a subject of no common interest and gratulation.

The art of sculpture is the simplest of all the arts in its materials and means of producing an effect. Painting combines drawing, coloring, light and shade, and many subordinate particulars. It imitates Nature more closely, and conveys to the mind of the observer a greater variety of expression. It has the eloquence of the eye, the mantling blood, the rich and many-colored drapery, at its command. Its hold upon the feelings of the uninstructed is much stronger than that of sculpture. They see in its creations, not the high ideal beauty that dwelt in the mind of the artist, and breathed a life into every stroke of his pencil, but a nearer or more remote likeness to the animated forms around them. Its lofty meaning—its inspiration, they no more comprehend, than they comprehend a noble statue, or a glorious epic. But these popular attractions of painting are essentially transient. All our associations with them are tinged with a feeling of their transitoriness. We look to childhood for full, and active, and blooming health; to manhood for muscular strength, but less of the rose; to old age, for the faded color, the sunken cheek, the dimmed eye. Art, though soaring beyond the actual in humanity, is so far bound to it, that it must keep itself within the possible or the probable. Thus, when we gaze upon a beautiful and finished painting, our minds are turned to the contemplation of the conditions under which human life exists. The bloom of youth calls up the thought of manhood and old age. And, in general, we are inclined to moralize on the shifting scenes and the different stages of man's worldly being, by the sight of exquisitely wrought pictures.

But when the mind has become accustomed to the aesthetic air of art, the judgement gradually separates the higher from the lower, the principal from the accessory attributes, and reposes on the essential qualities of the works before it. In this stage of the progress of taste, sculpture comes forward, with its simple and austere majesty, to meet the wants of the mind. Its stern and unearthly character, its chaste beauty, are doubtless hardly appreciated at first. The fascinations of color are yet on the mind like a spell. Severe Form, and the simplest expression of character, to be understood, require an abstraction from the senses, that is not easily, nor without repeated efforts, attained. The wish of a learned gentleman to paint the Venus de Medici, and the surprise of the honest old lady, when looking on Chantrey's Washington in the State-House, that "the Gineral was so pale," were not at all unnatural. But, in proportion to its simplicity, the art of sculpture has a concentrated power over the imagination and the heart, when the mind has become somewhat accustomed to its laws. If color is associated with the idea of transitoriness, Form is essentially immortal. It was a dogma of an ancient system of Philosophy, that Forms existed, as antetypes of all things, from eternity. This may seem a little mystical, but it is the expression of a truth, which has an important bearing on art. Form is eternal. It exists in the mind,

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and partakes of the mind's deathless nature. It is absolutely necessary to the conception of an idea of any object whatever; and the true meaning even of the word idea is form. We think of God, as having a Form, and we are told that God created man in his own likeness.

Sculpture is therefore better suited in its essential nature to convey the idea of unending duration. The material in which it works is admirably adapted to produce this effect. A beautiful or sublime conception of an artist, when once wrought up in the marble, stands there forever. Time has scarcely any power over it. The Apollo has remained, the grandest triumph of art, a god embodied in the breathing and moving marble, undimmed and undecaying, for sixteen or eighteen centuries; and the figures that adorned the Parthenon, excite as strong an admiration in the British spectator, while he gazes upon them, in the British Museum, as they did in the cultivated Athenian, four hundred years before the birth of Christ.

But we are wandering from Canova. Sculpture had fallen low before the time of this great man. He was the first among the moderns to call up from past and distant ages the true idea and the correct principles of his art. He banished from sculpture the grotesque barbarisms, which had usurped the place of antique grace, simplicity, and majesty. He may, in truth, be considered the founder of a new school, whose practice is guided by the broad principles of the ancients, the principles of beauty derived from the ideal, and founded. on nature. The statues exhibited at the Corinthian Hall are copies of some of his most interesting works. From these may be selected the group of the Graces, and the Hebe, in small, as probably the most attractive. The Dancing Girl, though a beautiful figure, is not altogether to our taste. There seems to be a little affectation in the attitude, and a simpering sentimentality in the position of the head and expression of the face, which, to say the least, are inconsistent with the higher beauties of the art. But the Graces are a most exquisite group. It is impossible to look on them, and not be filled with a sense of their surpassing loveliness. Their forms are developed with a perfect mastery over the technical learning of the art, and a most finished conception of beauty. Taken singly, they are perfect; taken together, they are a combination of perfections. Their attitudes are most excellent to show the graceful outline, and the swelling fullness, which charm the eye, and captivate the imagination. An ancient epigrammatist said, "The Graces seeking to find a temple, which shall never fall, took possession of the soul of Aristophanes." They have surely thought better of their first choice, and, in modern times, set up their worship in the soul of Canova. The figure of Hebe is among the most celebrated of Canova's works. The small copy exhibited in Corinthian Hall is a most beautiful piece of art. The marble, as if conscious of the perfect innocence of the being it represents, shows no defect, not a single colored vein to mar the delicate beauty of the Goddess of Youth. In this work, Canova exhibits his fine perception of simple and antique grace. All buoyant with immortal life, the Divinity appears in a form just bursting into the perfection of womanhood. Her attitude, her drapery, her contour, all at once inform the eye, of Youth, and Health, and Joy, ministering at the Festival of the Immortals.

Just as we had finished these few remarks, we heard with satisfaction that a new work of our countryman, Greenough, had just arrived in Boston. We have always looked forward with peculiar interest to the course of this most promising artist. We well remember his commanding figure and intellectual countenance while at college. His taste for art was strong; the inspiration was upon him; and when he left the walks of academic life, it was to study, and imitate, and rival the great works in the classic land of Italy. His whole life has thus far been most truly the life of an artist. With a mind richly cultivated by the treasured beauties of ancient and modern poetry, with a love of sculpture, as intense and self-forgetting as ever animated a human breast, with a generous ambition to acquire a name that shall do honor to his native land, and with a genius and industry to which nothing is denied, our young countryman bids fair to place himself in the same rank with Phidias and Praxiteles of the past, and with Canova, Thorwaldson, and Chantry of the present. God speed him.

The statue of Medora is modeled from Byron's description in the Corsair.

In life itself she was so still and fair,

That death with gentler aspect withered there;
And the cold flowers her colder hand contained,
In that last grasp as tenderly were strained
As if she scarcely felt, but feigned a sleep,
And made it almost mockery yet to weep;
The long dark lashes fringed her lids of snow,

And veiled-thought shrinks from all that lurked below-
Oh! o'er the eye death most exerts his might,
And hurls the spirit from her throne of light!
Sinks those blue orbs in that long last eclipse,
But spares as yet the charm around her lips-
Yet, yet they seem as they forbore to smile,
And wished repose-but only for a while;
But the white shroud, and each extended tress,
Long-fair-but spread in utter lifelessness,
Which late the sport of every summer wind,
Escaped the baffled wreath that strove to bind ;
These-and the pale pure cheek became the bier-
But she is nothing-wherefore is he here?

Beautiful poetry this! But go, reader, and gaze on the sculptured marble. The artist has surpassed the poet. Taking his general idea from Byron, Greenough has wrought it into a form of loveliness, and given it a tenderness, a pathos, a deep and solemn beauty, before which the gayest talker and the most frivolous laugher are silenced in a moment. No loud tones have been heard in that sad presence. It is the abode of death, but death in the perfection of melancholy beauty. Criticism is hardly possible. The deepest emotions of the heart are moved, and we come away with a sober and chastened feeling, and with an image of soft and gentle loveliness impressed upon the soul, which will abide there forever.

The chiseling of this beautiful piece is beyond praise. In the most subordinate particulars, it is finished with exquisite delicacy. The soul of the artist was in the work, and animated every part of it. The repose of the attitude, the sweetness of the expression, the flow and transparency of the drapery, are as near perfection as they can be. The wavy hair floats over the pillow in gentle undulations, wrought

with the finest delicacy of handling. Every part of the form, the lines. of the mouth, position of the head, the contour of the neck, the bust, the arms, the hand holding the flowers, and the draped limbs, are rendered with the utmost skill, harmony, chasteness and proportion. Before the beauties of this achievement of cultivated genius, description faulters. We borrow a few lines from Lord Byron, which, by a slight change of application, more closely illustrate this piece than the passage from which it was professedly taken.

He who hath bent him o'er the dead,
Ere the first day of death is fled;
The first dark day of nothingness
The last of danger and distress;
(Before Decay's effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers)
And marked the mild angelic air-
The rapture of repose that's there-
The fixed yet tender traits that streak
The languor of that placid cheek,
And-but for that sad shrouded eye,
That fires not-wins not-weeps not now-
And but for that chill changeless brow
Where cold obstruction's apathy
Appals the gazing mourner's heart
As if to him it could impart

The doom he dreads yet dwells upon--
Yes-but for these and these alone

Some moments-ay-one treacherous hour
He still might doubt the tyrant's power,
So fair, so calm, so softly sealed

The first, last look, by death revealed.

We have been told by gentlemen, who have visited Mr. Greenough's studio, in Florence, that Homer is his constant companion. The beautiful simplicity, and the vivid, animating genius of this poet, in whose verse the personages of the scene stand distinctly before the reader's eye, with the perfect outline and fully-developed form of statues, is a singularly appropriate teacher for the sculptor. In his poetry, there is nothing grotesque, exaggerated, or unnatural; but there is much that is supernatural or ideal. In this, Homer differs much from other early poets;-Dante, for example, whose immortal work is full of the most strange conceptions ;-and in this respect, too, Homer, rather than any other poet, should be in the hands of the sculptor. Homer was the copious fountain from which the ancient artists drew their conceptions of simplicity and beauty. When Phidias was asked whence he derived the idea of the Olympian Jupiter, he replied by quoting the famous lines in the Iliad, which describe the Father of Gods and Men as shaking Olympus by his nod; and an ancient critic remarked, that this statue was so wonderful and sublime, that Jupiter himself must have revealed his form to the vision of the artist.

It is a pleasant thing to contemplate a young American following the same career with the great men of antiquity. The bard of Chios teaching a native of the western world the same lesson of truth, and beauty, and grandeur, that he taught of old in the schools of Athens, must excite the dullest mind to a train of agreeable reflections.

Mr. Greenough has evidently benefited very much by his classical taste in literature. He is perfectly free from fantastic ornaments, and

tasteless trickery; he shows a preference of the pure and the simple over the gaudy and ornate; he confines himself strictly to the legitimate objects of his art, and now bids fair to rival the first masters in tenderness and grace, in propriety and dignity, in chasteness of design, and perfectness of execution. How far he will succeed in works of a more stern and sublime character, his countrymen have as yet had no opportunity of judging. In a few years we shall all have the privilege of seeing with our own eyes. To embody in enduring marble the imposing form of the FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY is a work, which the proudest genius should deem itself happy in accomplishing.

SCENES ABROAD.

This wide and universal theatre,

Presents more woful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play. SHAKSPEARE.

A bad world I say! I would I were a weaver,-I could sing all manner of songs. IBID.

It was on as cold a night as the good burghers of Gotham remember to have heard of since the days of Peter Stuyvesant, that Percival Russel, muffled up in the ample folds of a "whole circle" cloak, and bountifully bandaged about the ears with a red silk handkerchief, stepped into his carriage, which had been awaiting his pleasure for the last hour. "Francis!" quoth he to the shivering coachman, "drive to Mrs. Clinker's, in Bond-street." "Yes, sir," replied Francis, ceasing to beat time with his feet on the pavement, and off whirled the gay Percival Russel to Mrs. Clinker's grand ball.

Percival Russel was a wealthy orphan, fresh from his travels. From early youth his inclinations had been entirely unrestrained by the tender solicitude of any relation or friend,-but he grew to man's estate under the auspices of a guardian, who was too much absorbed in the percentage, which would accrue to him from his ward's estate, to take into consideration the cultivation of the young man's mind and morals. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, if our hero, exposed as he was to the thousand temptations of a great city, became wild and wayward in his habits, and drained the cup of pleasure to the dregs. He went through with the ceremony of a college course, and took the accustomed farcical degree at the end of it. Then he bethought him of happier climes-of those blissful abodes where the key of mammon unlocks the delights of life in rich profusion. "France is a delicious spot," thought he-and in a week he was on the way to Havre.

Three years elapsed, and our hero returned, a whiskered exquisite ; -but he had not crossed the great deep in vain-he had read the universal book of man, and had profited by it ;-natural good sense supplied, in a measure, the defects of education, and, becoming a man of the world, he learned to despise the pleasures for which he had so eagerly panted.

What befell our hero, will always befall young men of good common sense, who are unrestrained in their pursuit after pleasure. Oppose the wishes of such a person, and he will set you at defiance, and, on