TO THE SAME.
Elm Lodge, May 29, 1823.
This fine though cold weather finds your mother at Elm Lodge for a week, among blooms and verdure of the highest beauty, with an intention of returning next Saturday to Montague Square. This week would be called a little oasis in the desert of the town season by some who consider London as a heartless, dissipated, hot rendezvous, where so much pleasure is to be swallowed—no matter with what distaste—and so many ‘things to be done,’ only because others do them. You and I, however, look on London with other eyes, as the centre of wholesome, well-regulated liberty, of unfettered social intercourse, and of constantly-recurring opportunities and facilities for improvement at all ages. Would we were there together to enjoy them as heretofore. Nothing can be purer than the present predominating pleasures of town, for all those who are not in the dinner vortex—seeing fine pictures all the morning, and hearing fine music all the evening.
I know not whether you have seen Mr. Angerstein’s collection. It is now shown by tickets, given by his heir to a long list of acquaintance on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Six Claudes, with more than the usual imaginative elegance and poetic grace of that most delightful painter; were I Dame Nature, I would never sit for my picture to any other hand; for he not only represents her as perfectly beautiful, but as adorned with the highest taste and in the sweetest humour.
There are also the originals of Hogarth’s Mariage à la Mode, which strongly prove how much his pictures lose by being translated into engravings. As his style admits not exquisite outline, much of the beauty of his youthful figures arises from their colouring; and in the diminution of their good looks by hard black and white, we lose some of the charm and much of the probability of the story. In the engraving, the lawyer is so plain that it is difficult to consider him as a lover; not so in the painting, where he is whispering the bride with a dark-eyed handsome countenance of intense and glowing interest, and where, from due management of colours, even his flowing dress has some degree of beauty. Whimsically characteristic is his double occupation; for he is mending a pen, from long habit mechanically; and this neither interrupts nor is interrupted by—his making love.
The contrast between the fathers is much more striking, when we see the complexion of the full-fed gouty peer, and compare it with that of the penurious citizen; and the death-scene of the lady is far more impressive. The darned and dirty table-cloth, the squalor of the furniture and apartment, her ghastly paleness, and the stained complexion of the withered and weeping nurse, add a force to this picture I never dreamt of from the engraving.
There is also a Scotch merry-making by Wilkie, full of rustic humour and glee, with occasional touches of tenderness and a general tone of beauty. A young girl endeavouring to draw her father from a revel, where he has already drank too much, is full of sweetness; and while she presses his arm in the tenderest manner on one side, a more ardent, not more anxious, pleader on the other, in the shape of a jovial youth, has amicably seized the old man by the collar, and endeavours to allure him from her gentle grasp.
Canova, you see, is settling down into his due place; a fine sculptor, but not quite a Praxiteles, not the finest of all sculptors, ancient or modern.