e employed.
It thus constantly happens that persons themselves unaccustomed to
think clearly, or speak correctly, misunderstand a logical and careful
writer, and are actually in more danger of being misled by language
which is measured and precise, than by that which is loose and
inaccurate.

Now, in the instance before us, a person not accustomed to good
writing might very rashly conclude that when Reynolds spoke of the
Dutch School as one "in which the slowest intellect was sure to
succeed best," he meant to say that every successful Dutch painter was
a fool. We have no right to take his assertion in that sense. He says,
the _slowest_ intellect. We have no right to assume that he meant
the _weakest_. For it is true, that in order to succeed in the
Dutch style, a man has need of qualities of mind eminently deliberate
and sustained. He must be possessed of patience rather than of power;
and must feel no weariness in contemplating the expression of a single
thought for several months together. As opposed to the changeful
energies of the imagination, these mental characters may be properly
spoken of as under the general term--slowness of intellect. But it by
no means follows that they are necessarily those of weak or foolish
men.

We observe, however, farther, that the imitation which Reynolds
supposes to be characteristic of the Dutch School is that which gives
to objects such relief that they seem real, and that he then speaks of
this art of realistic imitation as corresponding to _history_ in
literature.

Reynolds, therefore, seems to class these dull works of the Dutch
School under a general head, to which they are not commonly
referred--that of _historical_ painting; while he speaks of the works
of the Italian School not as historical, but as _poetical_ painting.
His next sentence will farther manifest his meaning.

"The Italian attends only to the invariable, the great and general
ideas which are fixed and inherent in universal Nature; the Dutch, on
the contrary, to literal truth and a minute exactness in the detail,
as I may say, of Nature modified by accident. The attention to these
petty peculiarities is the very cause of this naturalness so much
admired in the Dutch pictures, which, if we suppose it to be a beauty,
is certainly of a lower order, which ought to give place to a beauty
of a superior kind, since one cannot be obtained but by departing from
the other.

"If my opinion was asked concerning the