Here Was
Venice Served Up To Order - Its Streets, Palaces, Churches, Bridges,
Canals, And Gondolas Made As Real To Our Eye As If We Were Looking At
Them Out Of A Window.
I admired them very warmly, but I could not go
into the raptures that C. did, who kept calling me from every thing
else that I wanted to see to come and look at this Canaletto.
"Well, I
see it," said I; "it is good - it is perfect - it cannot be bettered;
but what then? There is the same difference between these and a
landscape of Zuccarelli as there is between a neatly-arranged
statistical treatise and a poem. The latter suggests a thousand
images, the former gives you only information."
We were quite interested in a series of paintings which represented
the various events of the present queen's history. There was the
coronation in Westminster Abbey - that national romance which, for once
in our prosaic world, nearly turned the heads of all the sensible
people on earth. Think of vesting the sovereignty of so much of the
world in a fair young girl of seventeen! The picture is a very pretty
one, and is taken at the very moment she is kneeling at the feet of
the Archbishop of Canterbury to receive her crown. She is represented
as a fair-haired, interesting girl, the simplicity of her air
contrasting strangely with the pomp and gorgeous display around. The
painter has done justice to a train of charming young ladies who
surround her; among the faces I recognized the blue eyes and noble
forehead of the Duchess of Sutherland.
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