It now only remains to speak of the painters of animals. Every body will at once feel, that if the Greeks counted Apelles, and Pausias, and Nicias, among their best animal painters, that if Polygnotus chose to introduce a dog even into the Battle of Marathon, and that if part of the great fame of Protogenes arose from the manner in which he painted the dogs and the game in his Ialysus, the moderns have to boast of Rubens, whose various excellences would have been incomplete without his hunts of the lion and the boar; and Snyders, though professing little else, raised his animals to the dignity of history, by his manner of treating them. I might quote the pampered lap-dogs of Titian[211], and the graceful favourites of Paul Veronese[212], and even the tame partridge of the grave John Bellini[213], as well as the horses of Vandyke and Velasquez, as instances of occasional success in these things. But I cannot regard the diligent Paul Potter as more than a very excellent cattle portrait painter, so unequal are his choice of subject and his treatment to his exquisite execution. Of Cuyp’s animals, I can only repeat what I have said as to his landscape, with which they are so intimately connected, that they form a part of it; and the same is true of Adrian Vanderveldt’s. This essay has grown to great length, because I have been tempted to a larger list of instances and examples than I intended; but yet I have abstained from naming many others well suited to my purpose. Of those I have quoted, with the exception of antique works, there are not six of which I have not myself seen the originals. FOOTNOTES: [142] Fuseli felt the incongruity and inconvenience of throwing together all the variety of pictures which commonly take the name of historical paintings, and has judiciously divided, and eloquently supported the division of that class of pictures into nearly the same sections as I have proposed. But he looked too disdainfully on all art which he did not practise, to have great weight; and is on that account, as well as on some others, less followed than he deserves; he has not condescended to notice any other branch of painting except the historical portrait. [143] For the truth of this, see any catalogue of either ancient or modern masters. [144] Pliny says, b. xxv. ch. 2, that the Greek authors on Physic, Cratevus, Dionysius, and Metrodorus, painted every herb in colours; and under their portraits they couched and subscribed their several names and effects.--_Holland’s Trans._ [145] Reynolds for instance. But Fuseli more particularly, as I have mentioned in a former note. [146] It is worth the reader’s while to turn to an abridged account of this curious table in Moor’s three Essays. Cebes himself, seated by the death-bed of Socrates, and learning to hope with something like confidence for the immortality of the soul, furnishes a beautiful moral picture, which even the disagreeable translation of the Phædo, by Taylor, cannot spoil.