“The Sea at Mablethorpe is the grandest I know, except perhaps at Land’s End.” (That is as he afterwards explained to me in a letter.)
“Thackeray is the better artist, Dickens the [more affluent] Genius. He, like Hogarth, has the moral sublime sometimes: but not the ideal sublime. Perhaps I seem talking nonsense; I mean Hogarth could not conceive an Apollo or a Jupiter.” (Or Sigismunda.—E. F. G.)—“I think Hogarth greater than Dickens.”
(Looking at an engraving of the Sistine Madonna in which only She and the Child, I think, were represented.)
“Perhaps finer than the whole composition in so far as one’s eyes are more concentrated on the subject. The Child seems to me the furthest result of human art. His attitude is that of a man—his countenance a Jupiter’s—perhaps rather too much so.”
(He afterwards said (1852) that his own little boy, Hallam, explained the expression of Raffaelle’s. He said he thought he had known Raffaelle before he went to Italy—but not Michael Angelo—not only Statues and Frescoes, but some picture (I think) of a Madonna “dragging a ton of a Child over her Shoulder.”)
Seaford: December 27th-28th, 1852
“Babies delight in being moved to and from anything: that is amusement to them. What a Life of Wonder—every object new. This morning he (his own little boy) worshipp’d the Bed-post when a gleam of sunshine lighted on it.”
“I am afraid of him. It is a Man. Babes have an expression of grandeur that children lose. I used to think that the old Painters overdid the Expression and Dignity of their infant Christs: but I see they did not.”
“I was struck at the Duke’s (Wellington’s) Funeral with the look of sober Manhood and Humanity in the British Soldiers.”
(Of Laurence’s chalk drawing of ——’s head—“rather diplomatic than inhuman”—he said in fun.—E. F. G.)