88 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
there is a discordant jumbling —an Egyptian Sphinx, for in- 
stance, placed over a Doric portico; in all there prevails a 
vast amount of timid imitation. ‘The one repeats the other, 
either in general outline or in the subordinate parts. But the 
case is otherwise among the ichthyolites of the Old Red 
Sandstone; nor does it lessen the wonder, that their nicer 
ornaments should yield their beauty only to the microscope. 
There is unity of character in every scale, plate, and fin — 
unity such as all men of taste have learned to admire in 
those three Grecian orders from which the ingenuity of Rome 
was content to borrow, when it professed to invent — in the 
masculine Doric, the chaste and graceful Ionic, the exquisite- 
ly elegant Corinthian; and yet the unassisted eye fails to dis- 
cover the finer evidences of this unity: it would seem as if 
the adorable Architect had wrought it out in secret with ref- 
erence to the Divine idea alone. ‘The artist who sculptured 
the cherry-stone consigned it to a cabinet, and placed a mi- 
croscope beside it; the microscopic beauty of these ancient 
fish was consigned to the twilight depths of a primeval ocean. 
‘There is a feeling which at times grows upon the painter and 
the statuary, as if the perception and love of the beautiful 
had been sublimed into a kind of moral sense. Art comes 
to be pursued for its own sake; the exquisite conception in 
the mind, or the elegant and elaborate model, becomes all in 
all to the worker, and the dread of criticism or the appetite 
of praise almost nothing. And thus, through the influence 
of a power somewhat akin to conscience, but whose province 
is not the just and the good, but the fair, the refined, the ex- 
quisite, have works prosecuted in solitude, and never intended 
for the world, been found fraught with loveliness. Sir 
Thomas Lawrence, when finishing, with the most consum- 
mate care, a picture intended for a semi-barbarous, foreign 
