It may be remarked, as a general prevailing tendency amongst the great
Italian masters of painting, that there is the same conspicuous leaning
to regard the gigantic as a vulgar straining after effect. Witness St.
Paul before Agrippa, and St. Paul at Athens; Alexander the Great, or
the Archangel Michael. Nowhere throughout the whole world is the
opposite defect carried to a more intolerable excess than amongst the
low (but we regret to add--and in all but the very highest) of London
artists. Many things, which the wretched Von Raumer said of English
art, were abominable and malicious falsehooods; circulated not for
London, but for Berlin, and Dresden, where English engravers and
landscape-painters are too justly prized by the wealthy purchasers nor
to be hated by the needy sellers. Indeed to hear Von Raumer's account
of our water-color exhibitions, you would suppose that such men as
Turner, Dewint, Prout, and many others, had no merit whatever, and no
name except in London. Raumer is not an honest man. But had he fixed
his charges on the book-decorators amongst us, what an unlimited field
for ridicule the most reasonable! In most sentimental poems, the musing
young gentlemen and ladies usually run to seven and eight feet high.
And in a late popular novel connected with the Tower of London, by Mr.
Ainsworth, [which really pushes its falsifications of history to an
unpardonable length, as e.g. in the case of the gentle victim lady
Jane Grey,] the Spanish ambassador seems to us at least fourteen feet
high; and his legs meant for some ambassador who happened to be
twenty-seven feet high.