We doubt if any one colour, as we doubted of any one line, is _the_ colour of beauty; and as to red representing life, possibly by resemblance to blood, speaking to the eye of Art, we should not say that redness is the best exponent of the beautiful flesh of human life. If so, it is most seen in earliest infancy, when it positively displeases. The young bird and young mouse create even disgust from this too visible blood-redness. What is beauty? is quite another question from that of whether there is _a_ line of beauty. Lines may be pleasing or displeasing, in a degree independent of the objects in which they happen to be. Lines that correspond in symmetry, as well as colours which agree in harmony, may exist in disagreeable objects, leaving yet the question of beauty to be answered; though beauty, whatever it is, may require this correspondence of parts, this order, this sympathy in symmetry. Burke has separated the sublime from the beautiful. Mr Eastlake has, we suppose intentionally, with a view to his ulterior object, in this fragment omitted any such distinction. He may be the more judicious in this, as Burke admits ugliness into his Sublime. It has been supposed that the ancient artists studied the forms of inferior animals for the purpose of embellishing the human. The bull and lion have been recognised in the heads of Jupiter and Hercules. Mr Eastlake lays stress upon the necessity in avoiding, in representing the human, every characteristic of the brute; and quotes Sir Charles Bell, who says, "I hold it to be an inevitable consequence of such a comparison, that they should discover that the perfection of the human form was to be attained by avoiding what was characteristic of the inferior animals, and increasing the proportions of those features which belong to man." This is doubtless well put; but there is an extraordinary fact that seems to remove this characteristic peculiarity from the idea of beauty, however it may add it to the idea of perfection. Man is the only risible animal: risibility may be said, therefore, to be his distinguishing mark. If so, far from attributing any beauty to it, even when we admit its agreeability, we deny its beauty,--we even see in it distortion. Painters universally avoid representing it. They prefer the "Santo, onesto, e grave ciglio." Some have thought the smile, so successfully rendered by Correggio, the letting down of beauty into an inferior grace. Perhaps the sum of the view taken by Mr Eastlake may be best shown by a quotation:--