there are few vigorous sallies, or poetical flights, or passages of deep discernment and delicate discrimination. He wants imagination to raise him to the height of his "great argument," and his powers of illustration are neither vivid nor various. Yet it cannot be denied that many valuable reflections are scattered over these four lectures. Let all those youths who desire to become artists read the following admirable passage thrice over before they wet the brush.

"Impressed as I am at the present moment with a full conviction of the difficulties attendant on the practice of painting, I cannot but feel it also my duty to caution every one who hears me, against entering into it from improper motives, and with inadequate views of the subject; as they will thereby only run a risk of entailing misery and disgrace on themselves and their connexions during the rest of their lives. Should any student therefore happen to be present who has taken up the art on the supposition of finding it an easy and amusing employment-any one who has been sent into the Academy by his friends, in the idea that he may cheaply acquire an honourable and profitable profession any one who has mistaken a petty kind of imitative monkey talent for genius-any one who hopes by it to get rid of what he thinks a more vulgar or disagreeable situation, to escape confinement at the counter, or the desk-any one urged merely by vanity or interest—or, in short, impelled by any consideration but a real and unconquerable passion for excellence; let him drop it at once, and avoid these walls and every thing connected with them, as he would the pestilence; for if he have not this unquenchable liking, in addition to all the requisites above enumerated, he may pine in indigence, or skulk through life as a hackney likenesstaker, a copier, a drawing-master, or pattern drawer to young ladies, or he may turn picture cleaner and

help Time to destroy excellences which he cannot rival-but he must never hope to be, in the proper sense of the word, a painter. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to excellence, and few there be that find it."

His notion of the ideal or the beautiful is natural and just. "I will not undertake,” he says, “the perilous task of defining the word beauty: but I have no hesitation in asserting, that when beauty is said to be the proper end of art, it must not be understood as confining the choice to one set of objects, or as breaking down the boundaries and destroying the natural classes, orders, and divisions of things, but as meaning the perfection of each subject t in its kind, in regard to form, colour, and all its other associated and consistent attributes. In this qualified and, I will venture to say, proper acceptation of the word in regard to art, it may be applied to nearly all things most excellent in their different ways. Thus we have various modes of beauty in the statues of the Venus, the Juno, the Niobe, the Antinous, and the Apollo; and thus we may speak, without exciting a confusion of ideas, of a beautiful peasant as well as of a beautiful princess, of a beautiful child, or of a beautiful old man; of a beautiful cottage, a beautiful church, a beautiful palace, or even of a beautiful ruin. The discovery or conception of this great and perfect idea of things, of nature in its purest and most essential form, unimpaired by disease, unmutilated by accident, and un sophisticated by local habits and temporary fashions, and the exemplification of it in practice by getting above individual imitation, rising from the species to the genus, and uniting in every subject all the perfection of which it is capable in its kind, is the highest and ultimate exertion of human genius."

In his Lecture upon Invention, also, there is much to commend. "Unfortunately," he says, "this most inestimable quality, in which genius is thought more

particularly to consist, is of all human faculties the least subject to reason or rule, being derived from heaven alone, according to some; attributed by others to organization; by a third class, to industry; by a fourth, to circumstances; by a fifth, to the influence of the stars; and in the general opinion, the gift of nature only. But though few teach us how to improve it, and still fewer how to obtain it, all agree that nothing can be done without it. Destitute of invention, a poet is but a plagiary, and a painter but a copier of others. But however true it may be, that invention cannot be reduced to rule and taught by regular process, it must necessarily, like every other effect, have an adequate cause. It cannot be by chance that excellence is produced with certainty and constancy; and however remote and obscure its origin, thus much is certain, that observation must precede invention, and a mass of materials must be collected before we can combine them. He, therefore, who wishes to be a painter must overlook no kind of knowledge. He must range deserts and mountains for images, picture upon his mind every tree of the forest and flower of the valley, observe the crags of the rock and the pinnacles of the palace, follow the windings of the rivulet, and watch the changes of the clouds: in short, all nature, savage or civilized, animate or inanimate, the plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, and the motions of the sky, must undergo is examination. Whatever is great, whatever is eautiful, whatever is interesting, and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination, and concur to store his mind with an inexhaustible variety of ideas ready for association on every possible occasion, to embellish sentiment and give effect to truth. It is moreover absolutely necessary that then the epitome of all-his principal subject and his judgeshould become a particular object of his investigation: he must be acquainted with all that is characteristic

and beautiful, both in regard to his mental and bodily endowments; must study their analogies, and learn how far moral and physical excellence are connected and dependent one on the other. He must farther observe the power of the passions in all their combinations, and trace their changes as modified by constitution, or by the accidental influences of climate or custom, from the sprightliness of infancy to the despondency of decrepitude: he must be familiar with all the modes of life, and, above all, endeavour to discriminate the essential from the accidental, to divest himself of the prejudices of his own age and country, and, disregarding temporary fashions and local taste, learn to see nature and beauty in the abstract, and rise to general and transcendental truth, which will always be the same.'

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Next to the contemplation of nature he urges the study of poetry, which abounds in the noblest pictures and the most splendid descriptions, unites the present with the past, and anticipates the future. He feels, however, that many of the sublimest and most touching passages in poetry cannot be imbodied in painting; and he also feels that the multitude, with many men of taste among them, are slow in acknowledging the merits which belong to the imagination, and turn coldly away from its most magnificent efforts. There is, indeed, a certain coarseness of feeling as to works of elegance and fancy which pervades this country; and it extends to the labours of the pen as well as to those of the pencil and the chisel. In other nations, the presence of such things inspires a kind of awe: with us a statue is occasionally a mark to cast stones at, and the mob at best bestow their shilling to stare at what they cannot enjoy. "So habituated," says Opie," are the people of this country to the sight of portraiture only, that they can scarcely as yet consider painting in any other light; they will hardly admire a landscape that is not a view of a particular