Titian, but it is always to
be remembered that Titian hardly ever paints sunshine, but a certain
opalescent twilight which has as much of human emotion as of imitative
truth in it,--

"The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality:"

and that art of this kind must always be liable to some appearance of
failure when compared with a less pathetic statement of facts.

It is to be noted, however, that the licenses taken by Rubens in
particular instances are as bold as his general statements are sincere.
In the landscape just instanced the horizon is an oblique line; in the
Sunset of our own gallery many of the shadows fall at right angles to
the light; and in a picture in the Dulwich gallery a rainbow is seen by
the spectator at the side of the sun.

These bold and frank licenses are not to be considered as detracting
from the rank of the painter; they are usually characteristic of those
minds whose grasp of nature is so certain and extensive as to enable
them fearlessly to sacrifice a truth of actuality to a truth of feeling.
Yet the young artist must keep in mind that the painter's greatness
consists not in his taking, but in his atoning for them.

Sec. 16. The lower Dutch schools.

Among the professed landscapists of the Dutch school, we find much
dexterous imitation of certain kinds of nature, remarkable usually for
its persevering rejection of whatever is great, valuable, or affecting
in the object studied. Where, however, they show real desire to paint
what they saw as far as they saw it, there is of course much in them
that is instructive, as in Cuyp and in the etchings of Waterloo, which
have even very sweet and genuine feeling; and so in some of their
architectural painters. But the object of the great body of them is
merely to display manual dexterities of one kind or another, and their
effect on the public mind is so totally for evil, that though I do not
deny the advantage an artist of real judgment may derive from the study
of some of them, I conceive the best patronage that any monarch could
possibly bestow upon the arts, would be to collect the whole body of
them into a grand gallery and burn it to the ground.

Sec. 17. English school, Wilson and Gainsborough.

Passing to the English school, we find a connecting link between them
and the Italians formed by Richard Wilson. Had this artist stu