l female figures which I have ever seen upon canvass, one of the most
affected, meagre, and uninteresting. Diana has been exchanged for an opera
dancer. The waist is pinched in, the attitude is full of conceit, and there
is a dark shadow about the neck, as if she had been trying some previous
experiment with a _rope_! Endymion could never open his eyes to gaze upon a
figure so utterly unworthy of the representation of an enamoured
deity.[190] The Cupids must also be condemned; for they are poor in form,
and indifferent in execution. The back ground has considerable merit: but I
fear the picture is too highly glazed. In this room also is the famous
picture of _Belisarius_, engraved with so much eclat by Desnoyers. I own
that I like the engraving better than the painting; for I see no occasion
for such a disproportionate quantity of warm colouring as this picture
exhibits.

Pope (in his Epistle to Jarvis, I think) says of artists, that, "to paint
the naked is their dear delight." No artists ever delighted so much in this
branch of painting as the French. Does not this taste argue a want--not
only of respect, but--of _feeling?_ It was therefore pleasing to me, my
dear friend, to turn my attention from the studied display of naked
goddesses, in the collection of the worthy Marquis of Sommariva, towards
objects a little more qualified to gratify the higher feelings connected
with art:--and the first thing which soothed me, when I _had_ so turned my
attention, was, the _Terpsichore_ of _Canova_. You know it from the print
by Morghen. The countenance, to my eye, is the perfection of female
beauty:--yet it is a countenance which seems to be the abstract--the result
of study, and of combination--rather than of beauty, as seen "in mortal
race which walks the earth." The drapery appears to be studiously
neglected--giving it the appearance of the antique, which had been battered
and bruised by the casualties of some two thousand years. By this, I mean
that the folds are not only numerous, but the intermediate parts are not
marked by that degree of precision and finish, which, in my opinion, they
ought to have received. Yet the whole has an enchantingly simple air: at
once classical, pure, and impressive. The Marquis has indeed great reason
to be proud of it.

But if I pat the right cheek of Canova with one hand, I must cuff his left
cheek with the other. Here is a Cupid by him, executed in 1787. It is
evidently the production of a