to Roine, to seek inspiration among the marvels of the Vatican. If it is true that he made a journey to Paris, it was not, at any rate, to become a pupil of Simon Vouet, as some of his biographers have asserted: a mere comparison of dates is sufficient to refute this error. Simon Vouet left for Constantinople, with Monsieur de Sancy, in 1612, at which time Valentin was only eleven years old. Vouet, according to the testimony of Félibien, did not return and found his school in Paris before the year 1627, at which period Valentin already enjoyed a high reputation as a painter in Rome, in which city he had resided for a considerable time. When Valentin arrived in Italy Caravaggio was just dead, and painters were beginning to free themselves from the influence which he had exerted during his lifetime. Like many other reformers, he had led away his cotemporaries by supporting a false system on chefs-d'œuvre, and bad principles on great examples. At his death there were only two parties remaining in Rome; that of Josepin and that of the Caracci, represented respectively by Domenichino and Guido. All that these rivals had left them to perform was the no very difficult task of proving that nature is not black, and that the genius of Caravaggio neither excused his contempt for noble and carefully chosen forms, nor his horror for a strong light. Valentin came to Rome during the period of this reaction of feeling, which was destined to receive additional force from the presence of Poussin, for it was not long before that great painter published his opinion on the different parties, and assigned to each its proper place. On the one hand, he pronounced Domenichino to be the greatest painter after Raphael; and, on the other, when speaking of Caravaggio, said, "This man came among us to destroy painting." In spite of this, however, Valentin was irresistibly led to an imitation of Caravaggio; his instinct prompted him to take this step from the very first, and nothing could turn him from the path he had taken, neither the general tendency to leave it, nor the authority and advice of Poussin, whose admirer and friend he was; so true is it, that in his conduct he obeyed an organization which was more powerful than the influence exerted by a great mind. To work he went, therefore, carried away by his enthusiasm for form which others despise, preferring force to grace, and ready, with Guercino, to sustain the theory of contrast against the defenders of unity. His genius was rough and · plebeian, and it is among the people that he looks for his subjects and his models; he finds that the reality is always sufficiently noble there, provided that he can succeed in portraying it, palpitating and striking. In his love for nature of this kind, which appears to him unjustly neglected, he lavishes his light and shade, in order that the subject may possess relief, vigor, and brilliancy, and, not knowing how to ennoble it, he surrounds it with darkness, and lends it the poetry of night. In the evening he frequents the taverns of Rome, and sits down amid volumes of tobacco-smoke, in order to study the physiognomies of gamblers, or seize the poses of drunkards, or the grimaces of itinerant musicians. Mixed up with this people of tatterdemalions and vagabonds, he observes their mode of life, their now reckless, now impassioned bearing, and their proud and manly beauty peering through their rags. Sometimes, in order that nothing of this reality which he is pursuing may escape him, he forgets himself in places where he meets low bullies and high-bred cavaliers, huddled together in the same strange confusion; and where the same light which displays the misery of a ragged beggar, sparkles on the sword which beats against the heels of the nobleman in his doublet. In this respect, although differing in one particular point, to which we shall have occasion to allude in another part of this notice, Valentin's taste mostly led him to select the same class of subjects as those chosen by Callot. Speaking of the latter, Monsieur Arsène Houssaye says: "What struck Callot most was Man. In his time humanity still possessed a thousand distinct characters; the parent tree had a thousand different graftings; either through chance or the will of the Creator, each man was then more thoroughly imbued than now with the spirit and manners of his part in the drama of smiles and tears which is played on the stage of this world. Jacques Callot, instead of studying the mysteries and grandeur of Nature, gave his attention to everything that appeared fantastic, ex it was again seized and carried off in the wagons of the conqueror, who did not think, as the consul Mummius once did at Corinth, that the gold of the conquered was sufficient to redeem objects of such travagant, or original. In a word, of all the actors in life who played their parts under his immediate observation, those who pleased him most were boastful soldiers, religious ballad-singers, who opened a mouth that was bigger than their money-value, or that it was an easy task to find bowl-mountebanks who prefaced their buffoonery with unlimited promises-mendicants in picturesque rags, and pilgrims with doublets slashed with time, spangled with box-rosaries, studded with artificial flowers, and covered with leaden medals, as well as with all the holy marvels of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours." In another part of his work, Monsieur Arsène Houssaye says of Callot: "He had the passion of creating tatterdemalions, bullies, and mountebanks, as other men have the passion of play." Meanwhile, the celebrated Cardinal Barberini, the nephew of Urban VIII., a great patron of artists, and especially of Nicholas Poussin, having heard of Mousù Valentino, (as he was then styled in Italy,) expressed a wish to see and patronize him as well. Among other pictures, he ordered of him a view of Rome with the Anio and the Tiber. In this picture Valentin was very successful, according to the account of the historian Baglione, who saw it exposed during his time in the palace of the chancellor's office of the apostolic see. It was for this same cardinal that Valentin painted the Decollation of Saint John the Baptist, a large canvas covered with numerous figures, remarkable for their being executed with that bold firmness of touch for which he was already known-gagliardamente, as the Italian account has it. But his principal work was the Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian, which he painted for the Basilica of Saint Peter's, in that Caravaggian manner which he had now made his own, and in which he had the opportunity of displaying an incredible energy of style. The two sufferers are stretched out upon a mechanical apparatus, and tied together, with the head of the one in the direction of the other's feet, while the cord which binds their feet and hands is attached to the axle of a capstan which the executioner is turning round. Valentin's picture was brought to Paris, after Bonaparte's conquests, at that memorable period when Rome was merely the chief town of a French department. But, after the second invasion, in 1815, a second Valentin who could produce other works of the same description. What a singular privilege is that possessed by objects of art, which can thus travel without the slightest danger throughout the world, among the baggage of victorious troops, for whom the mere possession of a chef-d'œuvre is often a pledge of the honors of war and the most precious of all trophies! Valentin was unskillful in expression, unless he had to depict the most vulgar emotions of the soul. So far from appreciating the shades of sentiment, and the varied language of the passions, he could only seize their coarsest and most simple forms; and, with him, the word expression may be taken to mean not only the contraction of the face, but also historical and philosophical propriety, and a number of circumstances inseparable from the subject. In order to obtain a correct idea of what he wants in this respect, it is not even necessary to compare him to Poussin. It would, without doubt, be unjust to place Valentin's Solomon, a beardless young man, badly clad, of a lymphatic temperament and clumsy joints, without dignity or grace, by the side of the other Solomon, so majestically draped, and yet so simple, calm, and impassible, seated with an air of grandeur, expressing his impartiality by his attitude, and pointing out with his finger the true mother almost without a movement. It would at first appear that the knowledge of the value of gesture and the power of pantomimic expression ought to belong to a painter who confines himself altogether to reality; and yet these qualities are only possessed by the philosophical artist, by him who, not content with observing the external signs of the various passions, endeavors to discover that which causes them to spring up in men's hearts. In this Judgment of Solomon the true mother is a beautiful woman, whose black hair causes her large white shoulders to stand out in bold relief. She is turning round, in order to snatch her child from the soldier who appears about to cut it in two, and this movement of hers allows us to perceive the type of the Roman face in the severe lines of her profile. It is by this that she is distinguished from the false mother, whose gesture is full of hypocrisy, and whose physiognomy is stamped with a character of baseness, as if the painter, in his ignorance of the play of the features, could find no other means of characterizing the good and the bad mother than by giving beauty to the one, and ugliness to the other. If we allow Valentin to be an admirable painter, it is especially on account of the truthfulness and force of his execution, and whenever the subject does not require those qualities of the mind in which he is deficient. To understand and admire him more at our ease, we ought to study him when he represents the picturesque episodes of that life of reality which he has chosen for his epic. We ought to follow him into the thick and smoky atmosphere of the guard-room, where soldiers are having their fortunes told them, or scraping on a fiddle. public, who covered themselves with garments of glaring hues, and found in every town some dark retreat or other, unknown to justice, and offering a place of refuge to every adventurer without hearth or home. As we have already remarked, the substance of Valentin's pictures is the same as that of Callot's engravings. The former, as well as the latter, offer us a lively representation of the manners of a certain period; but, although the epoch of Valentin's works is the same as that of Callot's, there is a marked difference in their manner of seeing things. The reason that this brilliant arabesque did not unfold itself before the eyes of the painter of Coulommiers as it did before those of the engraver of Nancy, is, that each of them gave the fruits of his observations the tinge of his own disposition, and stamped them with the impression of his own mind. The one chose the burlesque, the other the poetic side of the subject. Callot was more particularly struck with the gait of the passer-by, the easy swagAger of the cavalier, and that kind of misery a which, in his day, was coated with a varnish of elegance. He represented the agitated and wandering episodes of outof-door life which he had seen defiling before him, those joyous caravans of tatterdemalions who used to feast upon the sward, share their booty under the vault of heaven, and gild their rags in the Behold us in a retreat of gipsies. dirty and sallow-faced sorceress, with napkin bound around her head, like the women of Frascati, and hiding her countenance in the shade, is examining the hand of a kind of landsknecht, who is having his fortune told. The tranquillity of this low witch forms a striking contrast with the lively emotion that is visible in the soldier's features; and, as if the strangeness of the figures about him, and the appearance of the cavern, into which only a mysterious light finds its way through an air-hole, were not sufficient to trouble his thoughts, the companions of the prophetess succeed in exciting his imagination still more effectually by the noisy music which they are playing close to his ears. To the left, in the obscurity, is seen a man putting his hand into the gipsy's pocket, from which he draws forth a living cock, a sort of symbolical animal such as the old sibyls usually possess. In truth, it is not merely impossible to paint with a more masterly and vigorous touch; but, what is more, to initiate the spectator with greater success into the mysteries of the life led by the gipsies of those days-by that proscribed and vagabond race, with their eccentric costume and copper-colored complexions, who lived by rapine, or on the credulity of the sun. Valentin, on the contrary, devoted his attention to the in-door life of this wandering race; he entered with them the unknown retreats where they reposed themselves from their fatigues, or where, during the night, and by the light of their torches, they indulged in all kinds of pastimes. Valentin died poor. One day, during the great summer-heats, he had gone with his companions to amuse himself, and heated himself to an extraordinary degree. After night had set in he was returning to his own residence through the deserted streets of Rome, when, in passing over the Place d'Espagne, near the fountain Del Babbuino, he felt a desire to throw himself into the basin, in order to quench the fire which was consuming him. This act of imprudence brought on, doubtless, a pleurisy, for he died a few days afterward, in the year 1632, in the flower of his age, being only thirty-one years old. D' CHRISTMAS CUSTOMS. ECEMBER, originally the tenth of the Roman months, is notable for the occurrence of the greatest festival of the year, Christmas, which takes place on the 25th. The merry-making with which this festival is associated, however, is not limited to a single day, but continues over a considerable portion of January also. Of course, we speak in reference to the manner in which Christmas was celebrated in former, more than in the present times, though the season is still observed with much feasting and conviviality. Christmas was wont to be hailed with an unusual degree of hilarity. The ancient halls of the barons, as well as the large kitchens of the yeomanry, were lighted up with a brilliancy on Christmas eve unknown to the rest of the year. The capacious fire-places of the houses of the olden time were filled with the Yuleclog, a huge block of wood, which enlivened everybody with its warmth; while the large Christmas candle was lighted, and shed its rays on the faces of the dancers. It was then that the laugh rang through the hall, and that the host shouted to his friends the merry distich : : "Come, bring, with a noise, Bids ye all be free, And drink to your heart's desiring." If we have lost some halcyon festivities with the passing away of these old customs, we may congratulate ourselves that with them have gone also some sad dissipations. The Christmas-log having been lighted "with the last year's brand," and the board having been covered with viands, the reign of "good cheer" began. The members of every household used to sit up all night, or, at all events, till past twelve o'clock, when the tolling of the church-bells announced the ushering in of Christmas. It is interesting to observe how intimately practical maxims were blended with the superstitious observances of our forefathers. The Yule-fire having been lighted, it was held essential that the maidservant who ignited it should wash her hands after the operation, thereby inculcating cleanliness along with the Christmas rite. The following verse explains the popular notion on the subject: "Wash your hands, or else the fire The "carol," or pious song, is peculiar to Christmas, and is of very old standing. Brand gives a translation of an AngloNorman carol of the thirteenth century, which is exceedingly spirited and highly poetical: |