By the bye, I suspected M. of being the disparager of the frame; hence a _certain line_.
For the frame,'tis as the room is, where it hangs. It hung up fronting my old cobwebby folios and batter'd furniture (the fruit piece has resum'd its place) and was much better than a spick and span one. But if your room be very neat and your _other pictures_ bright with gilt, it should be so too. I can't judge, not having seen: but my dingy study it suited.
Martin's Belshazzar (the picture) I have seen. Its architectural effect is stupendous; but the human figures, the squalling contorted little antics that are playing at being frightend, like children at a sham ghost who half know it to be a mask, are detestable. Then the _letters_ are nothing more than a transparency lighted up, such as a Lord might order to be lit up, on a sudden at a Xmas Gambol, to scare the ladies. The _type_ is as plain as Baskervil's--they should have been dim, full of mystery, letters to the mind rather than the eye.--Rembrandt has painted only Belshazzar and a courtier or two (taking a part of the banquet for the whole) not fribbled out a mob of fine folks. Then every thing is so distinct, to the very necklaces, and that foolish little prophet. What _one_ point is there of interest? The ideal of such a subject is, that you the spectator should see nothing but what at the time you would have seen, the _hand_--and the _King_--not to be at leisure to make taylor-remarks on the dresses, or Doctor Kitchener-like to examine the good things at table.
Just such a confusd piece is his Joshua, fritterd into 1000 fragments, little armies here, little armies there--you should see only the _Sun_ and _Joshua_; if I remember, he has not left out that luminary entirely, but for Joshua, I was ten minutes a finding him out.
Still he is showy in all that is not the human figure or the preternatural interest: but the first are below a drawing school girl's attainment, and the last is a phantasmagoric trick, "Now you shall see what you shall see, dare is Balshazar and dare is Daniel." You have my thoughts of M. and so adieu C. LAMB.
[Lamb had sent Barton the picture that is reproduced in Vol. V. of my large edition. Later Lamb had sent the following lines:--