gth, repulsive character; the other is all divine grace and mild
sensibility. The individual, the characteristic in painting, is that
_which is_ in a marked manner--the _ideal_ is that which we wish
anything to be, and to contemplate without measure and without end.
The first is truth, the last is good. The one appeals to the sense
and understanding, the other to the will and the affections. The truly
beautiful and grand attracts the mind to it by instinctive harmony, is
absorbed in it, and nothing can ever part them afterwards. Look at
a Madonna of Raphael's: what gives the _ideal_ character to the
expression,--the insatiable purpose of the soul, or its measureless
content in the object of its contemplation? A portrait of Vandyke's is
mere indifference and still-life in the comparison: it has not in it the
principle of growing and still unsatisfied desire. In the _ideal_ there
is no fixed stint or limit but the limit of possibility: it is the
infinite with respect to human capacities and wishes. Love is for this
reason an _ideal_ passion. We give to it our all of hope, of fear, of
present enjoyment, and stake our last chance of happiness wilfully and
desperately upon it. A good authority puts into the mouth of one of his
heroines--

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep!

How many fair catechumens will there be found in all ages to repeat as
much after Shakespear's Juliet!

NOTES to ESSAY XVI

(1) And surely Mandricardo was no baby. --HARRINGTON's _Ariosto._

ESSAY XVII. ON THE FEAR OF DEATH

And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has
a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this
gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will
come when we shall cease to be? I have no wish to have been alive a
hundred years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne: why should I regret
and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years
hence, in the reign of I cannot tell whom?

When Bickerstaff wrote his Essays I knew nothing of the subjects
of them; nay, much later, and but the other day, as it were, in the
beginning of the reign of George III., when Goldsmith, Johnson, Burke,
used to meet at the Globe, when Garrick was in his glory, and Reynolds
was over head and ears with his portraits, and Sterne brought out the
volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ year by year, it