dy, he says, when recommending the proper objects of
ambition to the young artist:

'My advice in a word is this: keep your principal attention fixed upon
the higher excellencies. If you compass them, and compass nothing more,
you are still in the first class. We may regret the innumerable beauties
which you may want; you may be very imperfect, but still you are an
imperfect artist of the highest order.'

This is the Fifth Discourse. In the Seventh our artist seems to waver,
and flings a doubt on his former decision, whereby 'it loses some
colour.'

'Indeed perfection in an inferior style may be reasonably preferred to
mediocrity in the highest walks of art. A landscape of Claude Lorraine
_may_(2) be preferred to a history by Luca Giordano: but hence appears
the necessity of the connoisseur's knowing in what consists the
excellency of each class, in order to judge how near it approaches to
perfection.'

As he advances, however, he grows bolder, and altogether discards his
theory of judging of the artist by the class to which he belongs--'But
we have the sanction of all mankind,' he says, 'in preferring genius in
a lower rank of art to feebleness and insipidity in the highest.' This
is in speaking of Gainsborough. The whole passage is excellent, and, I
should think, conclusive against the general and factitious style of art
on which he insists so much at other times.

'On this ground, however unsafe, I will venture to prophesy, that two of
the last distinguished painters of that country, I mean Pompeio Battoni
and Rafaelle Mengs, however great their names may at present sound in
our ears,(3) will very soon fall into the rank of Imperiale, Sebastian
Concha, Placido Constanza, Musaccio, and the rest of their immediate
predecessors; whose names, though equally renowned in their lifetime,
are now fallen into what is little short of total oblivion. I do not say
that those painters were not superior to the artist I allude to,(4) and
whose loss we lament, in a certain routine of practice, which, to the
eyes of common observers, has the air of a learned composition, and
bears a sort of superficial resemblance to the manner of the great men
who went before them. I know this perfectly well; but I know likewise,
that a man looking for real and lasting reputation must unlearn much of
the common-place method so observable in the works of the artists whom
I have named. For my own part, I confess, I take more interest in and
am m