SIR E. LANDSEER'S PICTURE 'THERE'S LIFE IN THE OLD DOG YET.' WE 1851. E have had several of Landseer's best pictures lately, but we are not likely soon to cry, 'Hold, enough!' The natural eye and heart is not easily wearied by nature and her true interpreters, be they poets, philosophers, or painters; the great point is to get nature, and then render her aright. It is, by the way, a new element in the fine arts, this setting famous pictures on their travels, and is on the whole a good one. We cheerfully adopt the peripa tetic or to-and-fro doctrine thus far. A brisk circulation is the great thing in the body, natural, social, and commercial, keep things going, large and quick returns ; and it is one proof of a higher organisation, or, to use the cant phrase, 'development' of the body politic, as it is of the individual animal, when there is a heart, and when it sends its life-giving stream swiftly round. Caterpillars, and dead, degraded, and somnolent nations have a local half-and-half sort of circulation, they want the one grand central organ; but lest our readers should mistake us, we don't think this organ in our body politic is London, though Wordsworth calls it this mighty heart,'-it is the grand amount of the intelligence, refinement, and goodness of the whole people. We therefore do not despair of having a visit of the Venus de Medici or of the Dying Gladiator, or even the entire Tribune of Florence, with its riches; and getting tickets from Mr. Hill or Mr. Crichton, that they are on view, and thus seeing in our own 'Auld Reekie' what has so long 'entranced the world.' This picture of Sir Edwin's is remarkable in several respects: it is very large; it is twenty years old; it gives us a curious means of judging of his young and his present style, and seeing how he is the same and yet different; it has the grand English qualification of being worth £5000, or £200 a year at 4 per cent. ; and best of all, it is a truly great and honest picture. By honest, we mean that the painter does his part in truth and honour, no blinking of difficulties, no filling up out of the lumber-room of other people's odds and ends, called his imagination; his is the truthful loving study of nature. This picture bears this out in every part, and it is worth remarking that being of so large a size, he had the ready temptation to 'generalise' and paint for effect. But he loved nature and honesty and himself too well to do this, and he has had his reward. Look at his last picture at Mr. Hill's, the 'Random Shot,' that dead mother and her suckling calf, on the cold mountaintop, and you will see the recompence of true work at |