Mutes, and Diderot described their author as a good man of letters, but without taste, without criticism, and without philosophy; _a ces bagatelles pres, le plus joli garcon du monde_.[22] [19] _E.g._ Watelet's poem, _Sur l'Art de Peindre_, 1760; Le Mierre's _Sur la Peinture_, 1769; Marsy's _Pictura Carmen_, 1736. See Diderot's works, xiii. 17, etc. [20] _Oeuv._, iii. 486. Guhrauer, ii. 15. Also Bluemner's admirable edition of the _Laocoeon_, p. 173. [21] xiii. 33. [22] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, iv. 136. In another place in the same work either Grimm or Diderot makes a remark about Batteux, which is worth remembering in our own age of official vindications of orthodoxy. The abbe had written a book about first causes. "I venture to observe moreover to M. l'abbe Batteux that when in this world a man has put on the dress of any sort of harlequin, red or black, with a pair of bands or a frill, he ought to give up once for all every kind of philosophic discussion, because it is impossible for him to speak according to his faith and his conscience; and a writer of bad faith is all the more odious, as nothing compelled him to break silence." _Ib._ vi. 120. Travellers to the land where criticism of art has been so slight, and where production has been so noble, so bounteous, so superb, published the story of what Italy had shown to them. Madame de Pompadour designed to make her brother the Superintendent of fine arts, and she despatched Cochin, the great engraver of the day, to accompany him in a studious tour through the holy land of the arts. Cochin was away nearly two years, and on his return produced three little volumes (1758), in which he deals such blows to some vaunted immortalities as made the idolators by convention not a little angry. The abbe Richard (1766) published six very stupid volumes on Italy, and such criticism on art as they contain is not worthy of serious remark. The President de Brosses spent a year in Italy (1739-40), and wrote letters to his friends at home, which may be read to-day with interest and pleasure for their graphic picture of Italian society; but the criticisms which they contain on the great works of art are those of a well-informed man of the world, taking many things for granted, rather than of a philosophical critic industriously using his own mind. His book recalls to us how true the eighteenth century was to itself in its hatred of Gothic architecture, that symbol and associate of mysticism, and of the age which the eighteenth century blindly abhorred as the source of all the tyrannical laws and cruel superstitions that still weighed so heavily on mankind. "You know the Palace of Saint Mark at Venice," says De Brosses: "_c'est un vilain monsieur, s'il eu fut jamais, massif, sombre, et gothique, du plus mechant gout_!"[23] [23] _Lettres Familieres_, i. 174. (Ed. 1869.)