"The successive and accurate survey of distant points is not, however, invariably requisite to a degree of similar pleasure, in viewing a figure of such small angular extent as to be instantly recognised by one location of its image, as analogous to a larger one whose survey has directly afforded muscular pleasure. Although I thus recognise the influence of association, the facts of this very case afford an interesting confirmation of the physiological theory; for a large circle or ellipse is more beautiful than one of diminutive size. The beauty of the one is original, its influence is direct; the beauty of the other is in part borrowed, and this part is weakened by reflection. Or, to express it more literally, the one excites a pleasurable sensation, the other suggests a similar idea; the one affords a _perception_, the other a _conception_, of beauty. Such, even with similar color and brilliancy, would be the difference between the full moon and a circular dot (·) or period; such the difference between a rainbow and a diminutive arc ([Illustration]), a short accent inverted. Here the critic might be inclined to charge us with confounding the beautiful with the sublime. But the fact is, that criticism has constructed the sublime--as it has the beautiful--from heterogeneous materials, one of which is identical with one of the elements of beauty, and should, in a physiological arrangement, be referred to the same class. In many instances a magnifying instrument will disclose minute irregularities and blemishes; but in every other case, physiology would show, that, within certain limits, to magnify a beautiful _object_ is to _magnify beauty_.