The practice of painting upon mirrors, common in Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is one which we must allude to in passing. Contrary as it seems to our notions of good taste, this fashion of decorating large sheets of metal is by no means disagreeable if the work will bear the same criticism as a framed picture on canvas. The finest specimens I have seen are those in the Stanza degli Specchi, in the Borghese Palace at Rome, where sheets of glass, as large as were then made, are covered with loves and wreaths life-size by Girofiri and Mario dei Fiori. The false vista thus created is peculiarly Italian: witness those less pleasing works which turn a house-side into a distant landscape, or fill blind openings with ladies and lovers upon balconies, pardonable only when we remember the Italian love for pleasant garden-images everywhere! Still, a room lined with painted mirrors is really pretty, brilliant, and festive, as roses suspended in the air, and visited by busy birds or bees, may fairly make it. It is a fashion so totally independent of the rigid canons of to-day that it is unjust to judge it by them.

The extended area of the walls deceives the eye in one place, but the objects painted on it recall the mind to a right sense of distance and prevent accidents to shortsighted persons. There is a room so painted at the British Embassy at Rome, and, prejudice aside, the effect is good. The silvery lights reflected in the mirrors are intercepted by colour, and all the possible bareness of the vast sheet disappears. Flowers in natural wreaths are preferable to cupids; and both are preferable to the destruction of mirrors or their concealment by irrelevant books and teacups; but, as the eye is even more constantly drawn to a painted mirror than an ordinary picture, by reason of its brightness, taste demands that the painting should be nothing less than first-rate.