mere resemblances; faithful,--but much more than
faithful; portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit,
at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives--in
which the eye seems to scrutinise us, and the mouth to command us--in
which the brow menaces, and the lip almost quivers with scorn--in which
every wrinkle is a comment on some important transaction. The account
which Thucydides has given of the retreat from Syracuse is, among
narratives, what Vandyke's Lord Strafford is among paintings.

Diversity, it is said, implies error: truth is one, and admits of no
degrees. We answer, that this principle holds good only in abstract
reasonings. When we talk of the truth of imitation in the fine arts, we
mean an imperfect and a graduated truth. No picture is exactly like
the original; nor is a picture good in proportion as it is like the
original. When Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does
not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the
canvas the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the
other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdingnagian maids
of honour. If he were to do this, the effect would not merely be
unpleasant, but, unless the scale of the picture were proportionably
enlarged, would be absolutely FALSE. And, after all, a microscope of
greater power than that which he had employed would convict him of
innumerable omissions. The same may be said of history. Perfectly and
absolutely true it cannot be: for, to be perfectly and absolutely
true, it ought to record ALL the slightest particulars of the slightest
transactions--all the things done and all the words uttered during
the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however
insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, the
Bodleian Library would not contain the occurrences of a week. What is
told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely small
proportion to what is suppressed. The difference between the copious
work of Clarendon and the account of the civil wars in the abridgment
of Goldsmith vanishes when compared with the immense mass of facts
respecting which both are equally silent.

No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth:
but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit
such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole.
He who is defici