Whatever
degrees of truth may have been attempted or attained by previous artists
have been more or less subordinate to pictorial or dramatic effect. In
Mr. Seddon's works, the primal object is to place the spectator, as far
as Art can do, in the scene represented, and to give him the perfect
sensation of its reality, wholly unmodified by the artist's execution."
Mr. Ruskin's judgment will not be questioned by those who have seen
Seddon's pictures. But it might also be added, that such accuracy as he
attained is by no means the result of mere laborious and conscientious
copying, but implies and requires the possession of strong and
well-balanced imagination.
We trust that the extracts we have given may lead lovers of Art to read
the whole of the little volume from which they are taken.
_Passages from my Autobiography_. By SYDNEY, LADY MORGAN. New York: D.
Appleton & Co. 1859.
Aged sportiveness is not seductive, and we do not become slaves at the
tap of a fan, when the hand that holds it is palsied and withered. We
have in the volume before us the melancholy spectacle of an aged female
of quality setting her cap at everybody.
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