furniture of every kind piled up in the streets; and as if to show a pretty general bankruptcy, together with the artist's own poverty, you would imagine an auction going on in every other house, by the Turkey carpets and odds and ends hanging from the windows. We have even seen a "Rag Fair" in a turnpike road. Novelty, Variety, and Contrast are required in Art, because they are the natural springs that move the mind to attention from its indolent quiescence; but having moved, their duty is performed--the mind of itself will do the rest; they must not act prominent parts. In every work there must be a simplicity which binds the whole together, as a whole; and whatever comes not within that girdle of the graces, is worse than superfluous--it draws off and distracts the attention which should be concentrated. Besides that simplicity which we have spoken of--and we have used the word in its technical sense, as that which keeps together and makes one thing of many parts--there is a simplicity which is best known by its opposite, affectation; upon this Sir Joshua enlarges. "Simplicity, being a negative virtue, cannot be described or defined." But it is possible, even in avoiding affectation, to convert simplicity into the very thing we strive to avoid. N. Poussin--whom, with regard to this virtue, he contrasts with others of the French school--Sir Joshua considers, in his abhorrence of the affectation of his countrymen, somewhat to approach it, by "what in writing would be called pedantry." Du Piles is justly censured for his recipe of grace and dignity. "If," says he, "you draw persons of high character and dignity, they ought to be drawn in such an attitude that the portraits must seem to speak to us of themselves, and as it were to say to us, 'Stop, take notice of me--I am the invincible king, surrounded by majesty.' 'I am the valiant commander who struck terror every where,' 'I am that great minister, who knew all the springs of politics.' 'I am that magistrate of consummate wisdom and probity.'" This is indeed affectation, and a very vulgar notion of greatness. We are reminded of Partridge, and his admiration of the overacting king. All the characters in thus seeming to say, would be little indeed. Not so Raffaelle and Titian understood grace and dignity. Simplicity he holds to be "our barrier against that great enemy to truth and nature, affectation, which is ever clinging to the pencil, and ready to drop and poison every thing it touches." Yet that, "when so very inartificial as to seem to evade the difficulties of art, is a very suspicious virtue." Sir Joshua dwells much upon this, because he thinks there is a perpetual tendency in young artists to run into affectation, and that from the very terms of the precepts offered them. "When a young artist is first told that his composition and his attitudes must be contrasted; that he must turn the head contrary to the position of the