omething to be
happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive
tendencies of the human frame; and painting combines them both
incessantly.(4) The hand is furnished a practical test of the
correctness of the eye; and the eye, thus admonished, imposes fresh
tasks of skill and industry upon the hand. Every stroke tells as the
verifying of a new truth; and every new observation, the instant it is
made, passes into an act and emanation of the will. Every step is
nearer what we wish, and yet there is always more to do. In spite of the
facility, the fluttering grace, the evanescent hues, that play round the
pencil of Rubens and Van-dyke, however I may admire, I do not envy them
this power so much as I do the slow, patient, laborious execution of
Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea del Sarto, where every touch
appears conscious of its charge, emulous of truth, and where the painful
artist has so distinctly wrought,

That you might almost say his picture thought.

In the one case the colours seem breathed on the canvas as if by magic,
the work and the wonder of a moment; in the other they seem inlaid in
the body of the work, and as if it took the artist years of unremitting
labour, and of delightful never-ending progress to perfection.(5) Who
would wish ever to come to the close of such works,--not to dwell on
them, to return to them, to be wedded to them to the last? Rubens, with
his florid, rapid style, complains that when he had just learned his
art, he should be forced to die. Leonardo, in the slow advances of his,
had lived long enough!

Painting is not, like writing, what is properly understood by a
sedentary employment. It requires not indeed a strong, but a continued
and steady exertion of muscular power. The precision and delicacy of
the manual operation, makes up for the want of vehemence,--as to balance
himself for any time in the same position the rope-dancer must strain
every nerve. Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an
appetite for one's dinner as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by
riding over Banstead Downs. It is related of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that
'he took no other exercise than what he used in his painting-room,'--the
writer means, in walking backwards and forwards to look at his picture;
but the act of painting itself, of laying on the colours in the
proper place and proper quantity, was a much harder exercise than this
alternate receding from and returning t