look at those two ragged and vicious vagrants that Murillo has gathered
out of the street. You smile at first, because they are eating so
naturally, and their roguery is so complete. But is there anything else
than roguery there, or was it well for the painter to give his time to
the painting of those repulsive and wicked children? Do you feel moved
with any charity towards children as you look at them? Are we the least
more likely to take any interest in ragged schools, or to help the next
pauper child that comes in our way, because the painter has shown us a
cunning beggar feeding greedily? Mark the choice of the act. He might
have shown hunger in other ways, and given interest to even this act of
eating, by making the face wasted, or the eye wistful. But he did not
care to do this. He delighted merely in the disgusting manner of eating,
the food filling the cheek; the boy is not hungry, else he would not
turn round to talk and grin as he eats.

Sec. LXI. But observe another point in the lower figure. It lies so that
the sole of the foot is turned towards the spectator; not because it
would have lain less easily in another attitude, but that the painter
may draw, and exhibit, the grey dust engrained in the foot. Do not call
this the painting of nature: it is mere delight in foulness. The lesson,
if there be any, in the picture, is not one whit the stronger. We all
know that a beggar's bare foot cannot be clean; there is no need to
thrust its degradation into the light, as if no human imagination were
vigorous enough for its conception.

Sec. LXII. The position of the Sensualists, in treatment of landscape,
is less distinctly marked than in that of the figure: because even the
wildest passions of nature are noble: but the inclination is manifested
by carelessness in marking generic form in trees and flowers: by their
preferring confused and irregular arrangements of foliage or foreground
to symmetrical and simple grouping; by their general choice of such
picturesqueness as results from decay, disorder, and disease, rather
than of that which is consistent with the perfection of the things in
which it is found; and by their imperfect rendering of the elements of
strength and beauty in all things. I propose to work out this subject
fully in the last volume of "Modern Painters;" but I trust that enough
has been here said to enable the reader to understand the relations of
the three great classes of artists, and therefore