GRATIAN.—Patrons of art are too often mere lovers of furniture,—have not seriously considered art, nor cultivated taste. And if it be a fault, it is not altogether their own; it is in character with genius to be in advance, and to teach, and by its own works. It is that there is a want of cultivation, of serious study, among artists themselves. If the patron could dictate, he would himself be the maker, the poet, the painter, the musician,—excellence of every kind precedes the taste to appreciate it. It makes the taste as well as the work: my friend Aquilius has made me a convert. I had not considered art, as it should be viewed, as a means of, as one of the languages of poetry. In truth, I have loved pictures more for their reminiscences than their independent power; and have therefore chiefly fixed my attention on views—actual scenery, with all its particulars. AQUILIUS.—What is high, what is great enough wholly to possess the mind, is not of particulars; like our religion, in this it is for all ages, all countries, and must not by adopting the particular, the peculiar one, diminish the catholicity of its empire. “The golden age” is, wherever or however embodied, a creation; and as no present age ever showed any thing like it, that is, visibly so,—what is seen must be nothing more than the elements out of which it may be made.—The golden age—where all is beauty, all is perfect! Purest should be the mind that would desire to see it. CURATE.—The golden age, if you mean by it the happy age, is but one field for art; you seem for the moment to forget, that we are so constituted as to feel a certain pleasure from terror, from fear—from the deepest tragedy—from what moves us to shed tears of pity, as well as what soothes to repose, or excites to gaiety. AQUILIUS.—Not so—but as we commenced to discuss chiefly the agreeability of subjects for pictures, let me be allowed to add, that I question if what is disgusting should not be excluded from even the tragic, perhaps chiefly from what is tragic. Cruelty even is not necessarily disgusting; it becomes so when meanness is added to it, and there is not a certain greatness in it. There might be a greatness even in deformity, and where it is not gratuitously given, but for a purpose. CURATE.—Yet, has not Raffaele been censured for the painfully distorted features of the Possessed Boy in his “Transfiguration.” AQUILIUS.—And it has with some show of truth (for who would like to speak more positively against the judgment of Raffaele) been thought that Domenichino, who borrowed this subject from him, has improved the interest by rendering the face of the lunatic one of extreme beauty! The Curate was here called away upon his parochial duties, and our discussion for the present terminated. Will it amuse you, Eusebius? If not, you have incurred the penalty of reading it, by not making one of our party. Yours ever, AQUILIUS.