een enabled to speak with accuracy upon the distinguishing marks of
schools and masters. A universal admiration, a love that will embrace
all schools and all styles, is of very rare attainment, and perhaps
hardly to be desired; for every man of any strength, of any fixed tone
of character, must necessarily have a bias. And besides, one man
naturally receives more powerfully impressions through form, another
through colour. It is not inconsistent that a perfect connoisseur
should be equally affected by both; but the mind is not allowed the
same latitude with regard to subject; the passion will ever be for
that which is congenial; whatever is foreign to it will receive but a
cold and passing admiration. We should collect from the whole contents
of this volume, that the author was never an enthusiastic admirer of
what is termed high Italian art. He seldom dwells upon "the sublime
and beautiful." Gifted rather with a complacent acquiescence in what
is great, than stirred by it to any heat of rapture, it is probable
that at least the sphere of his pleasures was enlarged; and his nice
sense of the beauty, touch, and colour, rendered pictures, of subjects
of little interest, more pleasing to him, than they could be to the
connoisseur of more exclusive taste. His predilection is, however, for
Colour; and we agree with him, "that without the science of colouring,
that so difficult science, about which the exclusive partisans of
ideal beauty trouble themselves so little, their antiques and their
ideal perfection may produce designs, but never can pictures."

Two definitions are laid down, which, as frequent reference is made to
them, we copy. Definition of painting--"The art of applying colours,
without relief, upon a plain surface, so as to imitate any object in
the manner in which it is seen, or may be conceived visible in
nature." "A good picture" he defines to be, "a good choice of subject
well represented." If we knew precisely what is here meant by
"nature," a word used by all writers on art in very various senses,
and commonly very vaguely, we might not find fault with the
definition; but genius, which has

"Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new,"

is not too strictly to be limited to the actualities of external
nature. It is the nature of the mind, under certain impulses and
impressions, to exaggerate, to combine from memory, not from sight,
even to the verge of the impossible; for even this extravagance is the
p