ain degree of judgment.

Sec. 10. Duty of the press.

Such then is the rank and standing of our modern artists. We have,
living with us, and painting for us, the greatest painter of _all_ time;
a man with whose supremacy of power no intellect of past ages can be put
in comparison for a moment. Let us next inquire what is the rank of our
critics. Public taste, I believe, as far as it is the encourager and
supporter of art has been the same in all ages,--a fitful and
vacillating current of vague impression, perpetually liable to change,
subject to epidemic desires, and agitated by infectious passion, the
slave of fashion, and the fool of fancy, but yet always distinguishing
with singular clearsightedness, between that which is best and that
which is worst of the particular class of food which its morbid appetite
may call for; never failing to distinguish that which is produced by
intellect, from that which is not, though it may be intellect degraded
by ministering to its misguided will. Public taste may thus degrade a
race of men capable of the highest efforts in art into the portrait
painters of ephemeral fashions, but it will yet not fail of discovering
who, among these portrait painters, is the man of most mind. It will
separate the man who would have become Buonaroti from the man who would
have become Bandinelli, though it will employ both in painting curls,
and feathers, and bracelets. Hence, generally speaking, there is no
_comparative_ injustice done, no false elevation of the fool above the
man of mind, provided only that the man of mind will condescend to
supply the particular article which the public chooses to want. Of
course a thousand modifying circumstances interfere with the action of
the general rule; but, taking one case with another, we shall very
constantly find the price which the picture commands in the market a
pretty fair standard of the artist's rank of intellect. The press,
therefore, and all who pretend to lead the public taste, have not so
much to direct the multitude whom to go to, as what to ask for. Their
business is not to tell us which is our best painter, but to tell us
whether we are making our best painter do his best.

Sec. 11. Qualifications necessary for discharging it.

Sec. 12. General incapability of modern critics.

Sec. 13. And inconsistency with themselves.

Now none are capable of doing this, but those whose principles of
judgment are based both on thorough _practical_