xpression to a preconcerted system was perhaps
never more evidently shown than in a picture of the Judgment of Solomon
by so great a man as N. Poussin, which I once heard admired for the
skill and discrimination of the artist in making all the women, who are
ranged on one side, in the greatest alarm at the sentence of the judge,
while all the men on the opposite side see through the design of it.
Nature does not go to work or cast things in a regular mould in this
sort of way. I once heard a person remark of another, 'He has an eye
like a vicious horse.' This was a fair analogy. We all, I believe, have
noticed the look of a horse's eye just before he is going to bite or
kick. But will any one, therefore, describe to me exactly what that
look is? It was the same acute observer that said of a self-sufficient.,
prating music-master, 'He talks on all subjects _at sight_'--which
expressed the man at once by an allusion to his profession, the
coincidence was indeed perfect. Nothing else could compare with the easy
assurance with which this gentleman would volunteer an explanation of
things of which he was most ignorant, but the _nonchalance_ with which
a musician sits down to a harpsichord to play a piece he has never seen
before. My physiognomical friend would not have hit on this mode of
illustration without knowing the profession of the subject of his
criticism; but having this hint given him, it instantly suggested itself
to his 'sure trailing.' The manner of the speaker was evident; and the
association of the music-master sitting down to play at sight,
lurking in his mind, was immediately called out by the strength of his
impression of the character. The feeling of character and the felicity
of invention in explaining it were nearly allied to each other. The
first was so wrought up and running over that the transition to the last
was very easy and unavoidable. When Mr. Kean was so much praised for the
action of Richard in his last struggle with his triumphant antagonist,
where he stands, after his sword is wrested from him, with his hands
stretched out, 'as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very
phantoms of his despair had a withering power,' he said that he borrowed
it from seeing the last efforts of Painter in his fight with Oliver.
This assuredly did not lessen the merit of it. Thus it ever is with the
man of real genius. He has the feeling of truth already shrined in his
own breast, and his eye is still bent o