t so much disjoined from our own
diminutive race of beings, though his ideas are chaste, noble, and of
great conformity to their subjects. Michael Angelo's works have a
strong, peculiar, and marked character; they seem to proceed from his own
mind entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant, that he never needed,
or seemed to disdain, to look abroad for foreign help. Raffaelle's
materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure is his own.
The excellency of this extraordinary man lay in the propriety, beauty,
and majesty of his characters, his judicious contrivance of his
composition, correctness of drawing, purity of taste, and the skilful
accommodation of other men's conceptions to his own purpose. Nobody
excelled him in that judgment, with which he united to his own
observations on nature the energy of Michael Angelo, and the beauty and
simplicity of the antique. To the question, therefore, which ought to
hold the first rank, Raffaelle or Michael Angelo, it must be answered,
that if it is to be given to him who possessed a greater combination of
the higher qualities of the art than any other man, there is no doubt but
Raffaelle is the first. But if, according to Longinus, the sublime,
being the highest excellence that human composition can attain to,
abundantly compensates the absence of every other beauty, and atones for
all other deficiencies, then Michael Angelo demands the preference.

These two extraordinary men carried some of the higher excellences of the
art to a greater degree of perfection than probably they ever arrived at
before. They certainly have not been excelled, nor equalled since. Many
of their successors were induced to leave this great road as a beaten
path, endeavouring to surprise and please by something uncommon or new.
When this desire after novelty has proceeded from mere idleness or
caprice, it is not worth the trouble of criticism; but when it has been
in consequence of a busy mind of a peculiar complexion, it is always
striking and interesting, never insipid.

Such is the great style as it appears in those who possessed it at its
height; in this, search after novelty in conception or in treating the
subject has no place.

But there is another style, which, though inferior to the former, has
still great merit, because it shows that those who cultivated it were men
of lively and vigorous imagination. This I call the original or
characteristical style; this, being less