I may as well leave him here, for I cannot touch the central
point.
August 2d.--Day before yesterday I went again to the Exhibition, and
began the day with looking at the old masters. Positively, I do begin to
receive some pleasure from looking at pictures; but as yet it has nothing
to do with any technical merit, nor do I think I shall ever get so far as
that. Some landscapes by Ruysdael, and some portraits by Murillo,
Velasquez, and Titian, were those which I was most able to appreciate;
and I see reason for allowing, contrary to my opinion, as expressed a few
pages back, that a portrait may preserve some valuable characteristics of
the person represented. The pictures in the English portrait-gallery are
mostly very bad, and that may be the reason why I saw so little in them.
I saw too, at this last visit, a Virgin and Child, which appeared to me
to have an expression more adequate to the subject than most of the
innumerable virgins and children, in which we see only repetitions of
simple maternity; indeed, any mother, with her first child, would serve
an artist for one of them. But, in this picture the Virgin had a look as
if she were loving the infant as her own child, and at the same time
rendering him an awful worship, as to her Creator.
While I was sitting in the central saloon, listening to the music, a
young man accosted me, presuming that I was so-and-so, the American
author. He himself was a traveller for a publishing firm; and he
introduced conversation by talking of Uttoxeter, and my description of it
in an annual.
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