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bably earlier, when Domenico took his lute and requested Andrea to join him, but Andrea pleaded his anxiety to complete a certain portion of his work before desisting, and declined accompanying his friend. No sooner, however, was Domenico gone, than Andrea left also, waylaid him, struck him severely on the head with a piece of lead, and returned to his work in the chapel. He was soon informed of the calamity that had befallen his friend Domenico; he hastened to the spot, and the unsuspecting Domenico died in the arms of his treacherous companion. The story was first disclosed by Andrea on his death-bed; and ever since he has been distinguished by the just title of "Castagno the infamous." The works of Domenico were left unfinished.

Antonello himself seems to have done little to disseminate the new method for some years; though he eventually established it at Venice, where Bartolomeo Vivarini painted a picture in oil in the year 1473. This was at the period of Antonello's second visit to that city. The earliest of Antonello's known pictures, preserved, is in the Academy at Antwerp, and bears the date 1475. Its subject is the Crucifixion, and it is an inferior work: it is painted on a small panel of wild chestnut, and was probably executed at Venice.

Such is the substance of the history of a complete revolution in the practice of painting; but it must be again clearly stated that this discovery of the family of the Van Eycks at Bruges, and introduced into Italy by Antonello of Messina, was not the mere mixing of colours with oil, but the acquisition of a valuable oleo-resinous medium. Vasari expressly mentions that Van Eyck, by boiling linseed, poppy, and nut oils, with other mixtures, obtained that varnish, which not only he, but every painter in the world, had long desired.

Oil-painting is now general throughout Europe; but it was long before tempera painting was given up even in Flanders. It may appear remarkable that at present it is impossible to identify the special practice of the Van Eycks with any present method, though it must doubtless be preserved in the Low Countries; and it is probable that the common method with the Dutch and Flemish painters previous to Rubens and Rembrandt was an extremely slight modification of it. The modifications of individual practice will be incessant; and it is the search after new facilities supposed to be acquired by new vehicles which has been the destruction of modern practice; present effect superseding all consideration of durability: some modern pictures contain as much vehicle in themselves as would have been sufficient for all the pictures painted by the whole family of the Van Eycks put together. Every unnecessary touch in a picture is an injury to it; it is a perpetual incumbrance exposed to perpetual risk; the upper surface being destroyed by an under surface in, perhaps, all cases. The most obvious lesson taught by the great work we have had under consideration is that, whatever they may be, painters should be sparing with the vehicles in which they mix their colours. The impasto of early Venetian pictures is much the same as that of the "Adoration of the Lamb" at Ghent, the works of the Vivarini, the Bellini, and the earliest works of Titian, painted with a very similar vehicle, and with the smallest possible quantity of it, are still in a perfect state, while later works of the Venetians, as of the Flemings, and of our own painters, who have sacrificed almost every other quality to expedition and effect, are already half obliterated, and are only vieing with each other in the race of decay.

R. N. W.

THE STORY OF GREAT HISTORIES.

"THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE."

EDWARD GIBBON was a sickly child, and,—often confined to his bed whilst his companions were romping, books became the chief solace of his lonely hours. It was the middle of last century when "The Universal History" was in course of publication, and its new volumes, as they successively appeared, were the most welcome of visitors in the young invalid's chamber. They awakened a taste, for the gratification of which the materials were more ample than dainty; and "many crude lumps of Speed, Rapin, Mezeray, Davila, Father Paul, &c., were devoured like so many novels." And soon the intellectual vivacity, which usually urges a delicate youth into some path of scholarship, conducted young Gibbon to the historical ascent of Parnassus.

Walter Scott was fifteen years old, and was taking his first excursion on a pony of his own, when the vale of Perth burst upon his view. "I recollect," he says, "pulling up the reins without meaning to do so, and gazing on the scene before me as if I had been afraid it would shift before I could distinctly observe its different parts, or convince myself that what I saw was real. Since that hour the recollection of that inimitable landscape has possessed the strongest influence over my mind, and retained its place as a memorable thing." And it is with similar interest that we read Gibbon's experiences when, also in his fifteenth year, he got the first glimpse of that mighty panorama of which he was to become the peerless painter. "In the summer of 1751 I accompanied my father on a visit to Mr. Hoare's, in Wiltshire; but I was less delighted with the beauties of Stour

head than with discovering in the library a common book, the Continuation of Echard's Roman History.' To me the reigns of the successors of Constantine were absolutely new; and I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over the Danube when the summons of the dinner-bell reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast. This transient glance served rather to irritate than to appease my curiosity; and as soon as I returned to Bath, I procured the second and third volumes of Howel's History of the World,' which exhibit the Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my attention; and some instinct of criticism directed me to the genuine sources. Before I was sixteen, I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks; and the same ardour urged me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot, and to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's 'Abulfaragius." And thus, at the most susceptible period of existence, there rushed into these enthusiastic spirits a tumult of delightful ideas and brilliant realisations, which were destined to arrange themselves and reappear as the finest creations of genius. From the pages of Echard, and from the Links of Tay, the same germs of great thought arise and alight on every reader who opens the volume, on every tourist who takes a look from the Wicks of Baigley; but the mind had need to be a good and virgin soil if the ethereal seeds are to spring up in productions as exquisite as "The Fair Maid of Perth," or as stately as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

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In the progress of years the young Londoner outgrew his earlier ailments, and enjoyed that firm health so rare among book-worms, yet so essential to intellectual ascendancy. For although a club-foot or a weakly constitution is often the means of directing into literary channels the energy which would otherwise have gone off in yachting

EARLY ASPIRATIONS.

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or tiger-hunting, it is little which genius can achieve if mated for life to shattered nerves or a bad digestion. And there was truth as well as humour in the Last Minstrel's admission, when he gave the credit of his marvellous exploits to sound sleep and a superior peptic apparatus. Occasional verses and magazine essays may be thrown off in bright intervals by the victim of all the "pathies ;" but the architect of a great intellectual pyramid,-the builder of an epic or a "Novum Organon," and still more, the constructor of a first-rate history,-had need to be hale as a fish and strong as a lion. It was in the camp, and in the unwelcome activities of the local militia, that Gibbon's frame got the confirmation and case-hardening which fitted it for the toils of herculean authorship.

Whilst still a youth at college he was haunted by projects of historical composition; and from time to time he made commencements on "The Age of Sesostris," "The Revolutions of Switzerland," "The Life and Times of Sir Walter Raleigh;" but was happily led to desist before crossing the Rubicon of Paternoster Row. In the meanwhile, obeying an irresistible impulse, he went on amassing antiquarian and geographical information, till he was thoroughly at home in each of the by-gone Europes; and journeys in France and Italy gave the freshness of a personal familiarity to the scenes of great transactions. But it was not till his twenty-seventh year that the idea dawned on his imagination which, by concentrating all his powers on one great purpose, gave a delightful occupation to his days, and secured for his name a deathless celebrity.

Few things are more interesting than the origin of a famous book; and although a big book is not always a great one, when, in the last volume of a ponderous but well-known History of the French Revolution," we came to the following paragraph, we confess that for the moment that big

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