438 
able modesty of Englishmen may at last 
be prevailed on to allow that their coun- 
trymen have as much talent and genius 
as their neighbours, 
This amiable, but dangerous quality of 
public modesty no where shews itself to 
so inconceivable an excess, a3 in the pro- 
vinces of the modern drama, and the 
modern school of design. An English 
navigator fears no earthly competitor ; 
a stripling in the guards, or a volunteer 
“in the compting-house, only wishes that 
Bonaparte would try his generalship 
_against the corps to which he has the 
-honour to belong; secure of triumph, he 
-longs for the moment of. rivalry; the 
- buck, or the lounger, joins his comrades 
arm in arm, and undauntedly elbows off 
the unresisting passenger from the pave- 
ment. In all this I perceive no modesty; 
we are, in our own good opinion, the 
equals, if not the superiors of the whole 
world, and are in no degree impaired or 
fallen from: the high eminence to which 
our ancestors had risen. But, ask an 
.English critic, or any critic of the United 
-Kingdoms, if any of his countrymen now 
living can produce on the stage even a 
-farce ; ask a Virtuoso, if Englishmen can 
paint, or a member of the U y 
of C e, if they can make a statue 
-in marble; the blushing patriot is in- 
-stantly crest-fallen, he acknowledges the 
degeneracy of his day, and laments the 
-pitiable condition of his Island, where the 
sun of genius shines no longer, but 
6¢ Art after art goes out, andall is night.” 
I conceive this to be as strongly, and 
_as peculiarly the English malady, as any 
other disorder that has ever passed under 
“that name. In the complaints of Horace 
“respecting the critics of his time, he 
Tevels his shafts against a set of affected 
hyper-judicators, who thought every work 
of former ages preferable to those pro- 
duced in their own ; but he did not know 
_the greater extent of the critical disease, 
under which we in this island have la- 
boured; and which may, I think, be as 
successfully adduced to prove the un- 
‘propitious air and climate of England, as 
the want or meanness of talent which 
‘have been so copiously supposed to be 
native here, by the eloquent and excel- 
Tent philosophers of the continent in the 
Jast century. 
Quod sitam Graiis novitas invisa fuisset 
Quam nobis, quid nune esset vetus ? 
Had Greece, like us, perversely thought 
All modern art not worth a groat 5 
Where, tell me, critics, would you-seel 
Those beauties you now call antique? 
The Enquirer.—No. XXVI. 
But if, after all, antiquity will keep its” 
ground in spite of all the authority of 
Horace, and all the remonstrances’ of 
more modern declaimers; if the criffes, | 
who ascertained genius by climate and 
measured talents by degrees of latitude, 
were really as wise as they were ingeni- 
ous, and as thoroughly informed as they 
were self-satisfied ;1f they have beet: com- 
petent to establish past disputes, our ra- 
dical deficiency in that glow of creative 
enthusiasm which has. its tropics de- 
sivned with no ‘ess certitude than the 
celestial ones; and to prove, of course, 
our perpetual inability to vie in the arts 
with a Grecian, an Italian, or a French- 
man; Jet it be lawful at least to ask whe- 
ther we may not be allowed the honour 
of contending in the province of fancy 
with a Dutchman? with a being little 
nearer to antiquity than ourselves, and 
almost equally placed by the obduracy of 
nature beyond those indisputable boun- 
daries of genius? Tf a work of Rem- 
brandt, after his death, be worth five 
thousand pounds, must the English 
painter despair of ever bequeathing an 
equally valuable legacy? No, this com- 
petition is not wholly denied tous, The 
name of Reynolds already begins to re- 
ceive incense of a pecuniary nature. We 
have seen a picture, which lay so long 
unpurchased in his gallery, as to be at 
last picked up by the polygraphic adven- 
turers for sixty pounds;. we have seen 
that picture, after it had passed into the 
hands of another great painter, (whose 
ashes are now mixed with those of Rey- 
nolds,) sold by public auction to contend- 
oleae 
ing. amateurs, and eagerly purchased at ° 
the price of four hundred and fifty gui- 
neas. It therefore now becomes easy to 
calculate, by first weighing in this instance 
the time that had passed since the de- 
cease of Reynolds, in how many years 
more the same picture may be sold for 
ten times that sum! To this point of 
calculation the talents of our countrymen 
easily extend, and so far there appears to 
exist a just public sense of the value of 
painting. . 
Still, it is not meant to infer from this 
example that there is, or ever will be, 
any power in pecuniary reward of pro- 
ducing great painters. ‘The character- 
istic description of that people who rose’ 
to unrivalled excellence in the arts of 
painting and sculpture, is that they were 
<¢ Prater laudem nulliusavari.”” 
The Romans, by the testimony of Ilo- 
race, were the reverse; and it is remark- 
able that the Romans boast of no emi- 
nent 
