HOGARTH excepted, we produy one painter within the last fifty years, or sihe humour of exhibiting began, that has treated a story imaginatively? By this we mean, upon whom his subject has so acted, that it has seemed to direct him -- not to be arranged by him? Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have impressed themselves so tyrannically , that he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revelation? Any that has imparted to his positions, not merely so much truth as is enough to vey a story with clearness, but that individualising property, which should keep the subject so treated distin feature from every other subject, however similar, and to on apprehensions almost identical; so as that we might say, this and this part could have found an appropriate pla no other picture in the world but this? Is there anything in modern art -- we will not demand that it should be equal -- but in any way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the "Ariadne," iional Gallery? Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr rout about him, repeopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no further. But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it tributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presend new offers of a god, -- as if unscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some uning pageant -- her soul undistracted from Theseus -- Ariadne is still pag the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.
Here are two points miraculously iting; fierce society, with the feeling of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations, with the acts of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the present Bacchus, with the past Ariadwo stories, with double Time; separate, and harmonising. Had the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have beeory of the mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid act of a flattering offer met with a wele acceptahe broke for Theseus was not lightly to be pieced up by a God.
We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael ii. It is the Presentation of the new-boro Adam by the Almighty. A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men since born. But these are matters subordio the ception of the situation, displayed in this extraordinary produ. A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied with temperiain raptures of ubial anticipation, with a suitable aowledgement to the Giver of the blessing, in the tenance of the first bridegroom; something like the divided attention of the child (Adam was here a child maween the given toy, and the mother who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade, sidering the awful presehey were in, would have taken care to subtraething from t