[. 26 J (Jury, 
LETVERS FROM THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA, 
: : No. IV. 
Painters— Fainting. 
In my last, my dear P, I promised (threatened I should say, perhaps) 
to give you a short account, either of the writers, the painters, or the 
orators of America, I forget which. So—here goes for the great men 
of the brush, the writers being much too plentiful, and the orators not 
pleatiful enough just now, to suit my leisure, and the limits of your 
Monthly. 
Painters affect to be mighty careless of what an author may say about 
them or their art; and a few have had the modesty to ask, if it be not 
a great piece of presumption for anybody but a painter, to write a cri- 
ticism about painting; a great piece of presumption for a writer who 
never dirtied his fingers with a brush, nor ever made a mouth in his life, 
nor a face, in the way of trade, ever to say on paper what he thinks of 
people, who do nothing else but make mouths and faces, at so much a 
day. I might go further—for they go so far, some of these people with 
just wit enough to compose after the fashion of a bad poet or a poor 
apothecary (the effect is the same, though the painter may use a brush, 
the poet a pen, the apothecary a drug) they even go so far as to say, if 
they are not puffed by everybody, every day in the week, and all the 
year round, that criticism, take it altogether, does their particular art 
more harm than good. If so, the sooner the art is no more, and the 
sooner the professors of it are out of the way, the better. 
As if aman is not to know whether a rose be worth plucking, or a 
pair of breeches worth having, till he has gone through a course of 
botany, or undergone a regular apprenticeship to a tailor; as if it were 
not lawful for anybody to judge a work, which he himself is not able to 
produce. What folly! as if painting would ever be thought of, or 
-eared for—nay, as if painting or painters would ever have been heard of, 
but for the writers of their.age and of succeeding ages ; whatever such 
writers might happen to be, whether painters or not, judges or not, 
critics or not. 
Beseech you, gentlemen of the brush, what should we know of the 
painters who lived (so say the writers who flourished with them and after 
them), what should we know of the painters who lived, in the beautiful 
and superb maturity of Greece, ages and ages ago, four hundred years 
before the Christian era—what should we know of them or of their works, 
for their works are no more, but for the writers who lived with them; 
writers who have made the few fragments, which, but for the pen, would 
now be nameless and worthless, of more value than their weight in gold ? 
How should we know indeed that such people as we hear of now— 
Zeuxis, Parrhasius and Apelles, ever lived at all, but for the works, 
of other men; the literary men of that age, who probably (and it is to 
be hoped) never had a brush or a pallet in their hands? of men too—lI 
speak it with all care—of men, who, if Apelles and Zeuxis were a for- 
tieth part as vain or foolish as A. B. or C. D. of our day, would have 
been regarded as very presumptuous for speaking of them at all. Nay, 
what should we know, and what should we care about even the gods of 
the brush, who appeared after the revival of painting? of the Angelo, 
the Raphael, the Dominichino, the Carraci, &c. &c. men whose great 
works are yet alive where they can speak for themselves, but for the 
