ght without any change be employed on the highest, to which, indeed, it
seems more properly to belong. The greatest style, if that style is
confined to small figures such as Poussin generally painted, would
receive an additional grace by the elegance and precision of pencil so
admirable in the works of Teniers.

Though this school more particularly excelled in the mechanism of
painting, yet there are many who have shown great abilities in expressing
what must be ranked above mechanical excellences.

In the works of Frank Hals the portrait painter may observe the
composition of a face, the features well put together as the painters
express it, from whence proceeds that strong marked character of
individual nature which is so remarkable in his portraits, and is not to
be found in an equal degree in any other painter. If he had joined to
this most difficult part of the art a patience in finishing what he had
so correctly planned, he might justly have claimed the place which
Vandyke, all things considered, so justly holds as the first of portrait
painters.

Others of the same school have shown great power in expressing the
character and passions of those vulgar people which are the subjects of
their study and attention. Amongst those, Jean Stein seems to be one of
the most diligent and accurate observers of what passed in those scenes
which he frequented, and which were to him an academy. I can easily
imagine that if this extraordinary man had had the good fortune to have
been born in Italy instead of Holland, had he lived in Rome instead of
Leyden, and had been blessed with Michael Angelo and Raffaelle for his
masters instead of Brower and Van Gowen, that the same sagacity and
penetration which distinguished so accurately the different characters
and expression in his vulgar figures, would, when exerted in the
selection and imitation of what was great and elevated in nature, have
been equally successful, and his name would have been now ranged with the
great pillars and supporters of our art.

Men who, although thus bound down by the almost invincible powers of
early habits, have still exerted extraordinary abilities within their
narrow and confined circle, and have, from the natural vigour of their
mind, given such an interesting expression, such force and energy to
their works, though they cannot be recommended to be exactly imitated,
may yet invite an artist to endeavour to transfer, by a kind of parody,
those e