ON CERTAIN INCONSIDERATE CRITICISMS. • 239 



ideas of beauty, grandeur, and sublimity, from the poems of Hesiod 

 and Homer, and they returned the favour. Although Dryden, in 

 one part of his parallel between poetry and painting, as a poet, 

 gives an advantage to the former, as to extended narration, he agrees 

 in another page, with Plato and Cicero, that the chisel and pencil 

 produce forms superior to nature. " Upon this account," he says, 

 " the noblest poets and the best orators, when they desire to cele- 

 brate any extraordinary beauty, are forced to have recourse to sta- 

 tues and pictures, and to draw their persons and faces into compa- 

 rison." He also adds, further on, " I must say this, to the advan- 

 tage of painting even above tragedy, that what this last represents 

 in the space of many hours, the former shows us in one moment. 

 The action, the passion, and the manners, of so many persons as 

 are contained in a picture, are to be discerned at once, in the twink~ 

 ling of an eye : at least, they could be so, if the sight could travel 

 over so many different objects, or the mind digest them all, at the 

 same point of time." Leon Battista Alberti has put this in a very 

 strong point of view, to the advantage of painting, as addressed to 

 the eye. He says — '' The idea of eloquence is as inferior to that of 

 painting as the force of words is to the sight." That writer con- 

 ceived, with Othello, the '' ocular proof" to be the strongest. It is 

 certain that the effect of a noble picture is produced at once, al- 

 though the principal details come in for their share of admiration, 

 in the ensuing moments of continued inspection. As painting pos- 

 sesses this power above the poetry of tragedy, the great end and mo- 

 ral aim of which is to give lessons of instruction, it is an admission, 

 on the part of Dryden, that painting can both inform and instruct, 

 the point to which, as an admirer of the latter, my reasoning is di 

 rected, without any desire for a superiority. 



I must own I cannot conceive how any educated and considerate 

 person can think that there is no information, nor instruction, con- 

 veyed by Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, at Milan ; Michael An- 

 gelo's sublime frescos in the Sistine Chapel ; Raffaelle's biblical se- 

 ries and additional historical works, in the Vatican, his cartoons and 

 his other admirable pictures ; by Poussin*s Seven Sacraments, Bour- 

 den's Works of Mercy, and all the splendid historical and poetical 

 pictures painted during the last four hundred years. I hope that 



