'These remarks are the more necessary, as it must be confessed that the strength of the English painters never lay so much as it ought in _design_; and now perhaps, more than ever, they seem devoted to the charms of colour and effect, and captivate by the mere penmanship of the art--the empty legerdemain of the pencil. 'But if the English artist runs counter in this instance to the established character of his country, and prefers the superficial to the solid attainments in art, has he not many excuses? May it not in great measure be attributed to the general frivolity and meanness of the subjects he is called upon to treat? to the inordinate rage for portrait-painting (a more respectable kind of caricature), by which he is for ever condemned to study and copy the wretched defects, and conform to the still more wretched prejudices, of every tasteless and ignorant individual, however in form, features, and mind, utterly hostile to all ideas of character, expression, or sentiment? And may it not in part be attributed to the necessity he is under of painting always with reference to the exhibition? In a crowd he that talks loudest, not he that talks best, is surest of commanding attention; and in an exhibition he that does not attract the eye does nothing. But however plausible these excuses, it becomes the true painter to consider that they will avail nothing before the tribunal of the world and posterity. Keeping the true end of Art in view, he must rise superior to the prejudices, disregard the applause, and contemn the censure of corrupt and incompetent judges; far from aiming to be fashionable, it must be his object to reform, and not to flatter--to teach, and not to please--if he aspires, like Zeuxis, to paint for eternity.' The spirit of this passage will, I think, enable us to understand how irksome mere portrait-painting must always have been to our professor; and its precepts might be laid to heart even by the artists of the close of this nineteenth century. In the lecture on 'Invention' the following passage seems to me worthy of being reproduced. He observed that both the poet and the painter have 'something more to do than to illustrate, explain, or fill the chasms of history or tradition;' they must both first penetrate thoroughly into the subject, and then mould it anew.