d again, "He who sets himself to any work with which the Muses
have to do," (i. e. to any of the fine arts,) "without madness,
thinking that by art alone he can do his work sufficiently, will be
found vain and incapable, and the work of temperance and rationalism
will be thrust aside and obscured by that of inspiration." The
passages to the same effect, relating especially to poetry, are
innumerable in nearly all ancient writers; but in this of Plato, the
entire compass of the fine arts is intended to be embraced.

No one acquainted with other parts of my writings will suppose me to
be an advocate of idle trust in the imagination. But it is in these
days just as necessary to allege the supremacy of genius as the
necessity of labor; for there never was, perhaps, a period in which
the peculiar gift of the painter was so little discerned, in which
so many and so vain efforts have been made to replace it by study
and toil. This has been peculiarly the case with the German school,
and there are few exhibitions of human error more pitiable than the
manner in which the inferior members of it, men originally and for
ever destitute of the painting faculty, force themselves into an
unnatural, encumbered, learned fructification of tasteless fruit,
and pass laborious lives in setting obscurely and weakly upon canvas
the philosophy, if such it be, which ten minutes' work of a strong
man would have put into healthy practice, or plain words. I know not
anything more melancholy than the sight of the huge German cartoon,
with its objective side, and subjective side; and mythological
division, and symbolical division, and human and Divine division;
its allegorical sense, and literal sense; and ideal point of view,
and intellectual point of view; its heroism of well-made armor and
knitted brows; its heroinism of graceful attitude and braided hair;
its inwoven web of sentiment, and piety, and philosophy, and
anatomy, and history, all profound: and twenty innocent dashes of
the hand of one God-made painter, poor old Bassan or Bonifazio, were
worth it all, and worth it ten thousand times over.

Not that the sentiment or the philosophy is base in itself. They
will make a good man, but they will not make a good painter,--no,
nor the millionth part of a painter. They would have been good in
the work and wor