ting perfect beauty, and afterwards
adding the proper attributes, with a total indifference to which they
gave them.'

(What, then, becomes of that 'nice discrimination of character' for
which our author has just before celebrated them?)

'Thus John De Bologna, after he had finished a group of a young man
holding up a young woman in his arms, with an old man at his feet,
called his friends together, to tell him what name he should give it,
and it was agreed to call it The Rape of the Sabines; and this is the
celebrated group which now stands before the old Palace at Florence. The
figures have the same general expression which is to be found in most of
the antique Sculpture; and yet it would be no wonder if future critics
should find out delicacy of expression which was never intended, and go
so far as to see, in the old man's countenance, the exact relation which
he bore to the woman who appears to be taken from him.'

So it is that Sir Joshua's theory seems to rest on an inclined plane,
and is always glad of an excuse to slide, from the severity of truth
and nature, into the milder and more equable regions of insipidity and
inanity; I am sorry to say so, but so it appears to me.

I confess, it strikes me as a self-evident truth that variety or
contrast is as essential a principle in art and nature as uniformity,
and as necessary to make up the harmony of the universe and the
contentment of the mind. Who would destroy the shifting effects of light
and shade, the sharp, lively opposition of colours in the same or in
different objects, the streaks in a flower, the stains in a piece of
marble, to reduce all to the same neutral, dead colouring, the same
middle tint? Yet it is on this principle that Sir Joshua would get rid
of all variety, character, expression, and picturesque effect in forms,
or at least measure the worth or the spuriousness of all these according
to their reference to or departure from a given or average standard.
Surely, nature is more liberal, art is wider than Sir Joshua's theory.
Allow (for the sake of argument) that all forms are in themselves
indifferent, and that beauty or the sense of pleasure in forms can
therefore only arise from customary association, or from that middle
impression to which they all tend: yet this cannot by the same rule
apply to other things. Suppose there is no capacity in form to affect
the mind except from its corresponding to previous expectation, the same
thing cannot