their walks sketching landscapes from nature, or amusing
themselves with what the Italians call _Caricatura_, a term of large
signification; for it includes many sorts of grotesque inventions,
whimsical incongruities, such as those arabesques found at Herculaneum,
where Anchises, AEneas, and Ascanius are burlesqued by heads of apes and
pigs, or Arion, with a grotesque motion, is straddling a great trout; or
like that ludicrous parody which came from the hand of Titian in a
playful hour, when he sketched the Laocoon whose three figures consist
of apes. Annibale had a peculiar facility in these incongruous
inventions, and even the severe Leonardo da Vinci considered them as
useful exercises.

Such was the academy founded by the Caracci; and Lodovico lived to
realise his project in the reformation of art, and witnessed the school
of Bologna flourishing afresh when all the others had fallen. The great
masters of this last epoch of Italian painting were their pupils. Such
were Domenichino, who, according to the expression of Bellori, _delinea
gli animi, colorisce la vita_; he drew the soul and coloured life;[270]
Albano, whose grace distinguishes him as the Anacreon of painting;
Guido, whose touch was all beauty and delicacy, and, as Passeri
delightfully expresses it, "whose faces came from Paradise;"[271] a
scholar of whom his masters became jealous, while Annibale, to depress
Guido, patronised Domenichino, and even the wise Lodovico could not
dissimulate the fear of a new competitor in a pupil, and to mortify
Guido preferred Guercino, who trod in another path. Lanfranco closes
this glorious list, whose freedom and grandeur for their full display
required the ample field of some vast history.

The secret history of this _Academia_ forms an illustration for that
chapter on "Literary Jealousy" which I have written in "The Literary
Character." We have seen even the gentle Lodovico infected by it; but it
raged in the breast of Annibale. Careless of fortune as they were
through life, and free from the bonds of matrimony, that they might
wholly devote themselves to all the enthusiasm of their art, they lived
together in the perpetual intercourse of their thoughts; and even at
their meals laid on their table their crayons and their papers, so that
any motion or gesture which occurred, as worthy of picturing, was
instantly sketched. Annibale catching something of the critical taste of
Agostino, learnt to work more slowly, and to