g tirade to explain what a ridiculous farce the whole
was, and how all the people abroad wore shocked at the _gullibility_ of
the English nation, who on this and every other occasion were open to
the artifices of all sorts of quacks, wondering how any persons with the
smallest pretensions to common sense could for a moment suppose that
a boy could act the characters of men without any of their knowledge,
their experience, or their passions. We made some faint resistance, but
in vain. The discourse then took a turn, and Coleridge began a laboured
eulogy on some promising youth, the son of an English artist, whom he
had met in Italy, and who had wandered all over the Campagna with him,
whose talents, he assured us, were the admiration of all Rome, and whose
early designs had almost all the grace and purity of Raphael's. At last,
some one interrupted the endless theme by saying a little impatiently,
'Why just now you would not let us believe our own eyes and ears about
young Betty, because you have a theory against premature talents, and
now you start a boy phenomenon that nobody knows anything about but
yourself--a young artist that, you tell us, is to rival Raphael!' The
truth is, we like to have something to admire ourselves, as well as to
make other people gape and stare at; but then it must be a discovery of
our own, an idol of our own making and setting up:--if others stumble on
the discovery before us, or join in crying it up to the skies, we
then set to work to prove that this is a vulgar delusion, and show our
sagacity and freedom from prejudice by pulling it in pieces with all
the coolness imaginable. Whether we blow the bubble or crush it in our
hands, vanity and the desire of empty distinction are equally at the
bottom of our sanguine credulity or fastidious scepticism. There are
some who always fall in with the fashionable prejudice as others affect
singularity of opinion on all such points, according as they think they
have more or less wit to judge for themselves.

If a little varnishing and daubing, a little puffing and quacking, and
giving yourself a good name, and getting a friend to speak a word
for you, is excusable in any profession, it is, I think, in that
of painting. Painting is an occult science, and requires a little
ostentation and mock-gravity in the professor. A man may here rival
Katterfelto, 'with his hair on end at his own wonders, wondering for
his bread'; for, if he does not, he may in the