But the LANDSCAPE class! Surely it is strange to put the Enchanted Castle of Claude, and the Deluge of Poussin, together with views on Hounslow Heath, and scenes in the Waterloo tea gardens! Landscape painting, indeed, seems to be a modern art, as considered by itself; though it must have been practised for the sake of backgrounds by the ancients, as I shall have occasion to notice. It has pleased the writers upon painting to make a class apart of ANIMAL PAINTING, and to consider the class as an inferior one. It is right to separate it: but the inferiority will scarcely be allowed by those who know the works of Rubens and Snyders. At any rate, the ancients did not consider it mean, by their praise of the animals of Nicias and Pausias generally, of the horses of Apelles, and the dogs of Protogenes, in particular. In FRUIT, and FLOWERS, and STILL LIFE, we have again the ancients to support us. How lovely were the fresh flowers in the Stephanopolis of Pausias! Then the grapes of Zeuxis, and the curtain of Parrhasius, how exquisitely finished! As to the delineations of animals, plants, minerals, &c., for the purposes of natural history, they must be considered as combining the original uses of the graphic art; namely, history writing, with the practical improvement of modern times; and I shall not make any further mention of them[144]. It is evident that this classification is as absurd and inconvenient, as it would be in poetry to place under the same head, Homer’s Iliad and the ballad of Colin and Lucy, because both tell a story. If, however, in conformity with long usage, we must preserve these classes, they ought to be subdivided, so as to dispose works really of the same order apart from the masses in which they are now confounded. I am aware that, however decided the distinction may be between the great works that must form the example for each subdivision, it will be difficult to keep the limits so clear, that the exact place of any particular work may be known and fixed at once; but that is surely a small evil compared with the present confusion. The class HISTORY, has been felt to be so indefinite, that some of the best writers on art have tacitly divided it into the strictly Historical and the Dramatic[145]. As far as it goes, the division is excellent; but it still leaves such masses to be separated, that I cannot but wish for farther distinctions. For instance, I should wish not to place in the same class, the taking of Troy by Polygnotus, the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Aulis by Timanthes, and the single figure of Ajax by Apollodorus, but to allow each of those to be the example of a separate division; and quite apart from those, I should wish to place all allegorical and didactic subjects, as well as those in which the machinery of superior or inferior natures is introduced.