As Raphael in these works, no painter has ever done so much for the real excellence of the art, nor, in the principles upon which they are conducted, has placed improvement on precepts so pure, so unerring. All that imagination could lend to a strictly imitative art he has added, yet has infused into its creations the warmest sensibilities of life; to nature he has given all that grace and fancy can bestow, consistent with the sweetest of all charms--leaving her nature still. On this account is Raphael, of all great names in art, the safest to adopt as the guide of taste and practice. For were the most decided admirer of system merely to copy, he would quickly find himself constrained to become the disciple of reality. True, we discover no mixed modes of nature, such as impede her energies and cloud her beauties in ordinary life; yet the tranquil loveliness--the sinless beauty--the noble feeling of the representation--has nothing of the cold and merely imaginative. This, indeed, constitutes the great charm of Raphael's grace, that neither in form nor expression is it abstract; its power of moving is acquired directly from human sympathy. In gazing upon his dramatic scenes and breathing figures, who has not experienced this truth in a gradual melting of the heart, in unison with every pure and holy remembrance that connects man with the species? See the Madona--how mildly, simply beautiful! In that bosom not one rude passion has a resting place; yet feels not each spectator now called-up dear though distant recollections of a parent's--a mother's tenderness, with all the reverential charities of life's spring? Behold the Magdalen--how changed the sensibilities! still how respectable! One overmastering, absorbing affection. No meretricious display--every movement is that of passion, but of sentiment too. Or view that youth so intent upon instruction; he hangs upon the very words of his aged guide. How powerfully do we conceive the mature resolves that irradiate the ingenuous countenance! Or turn your attention to the child who is playing in the lap of the mother--how innocently happy! how unconsciously beautiful! Yet look again;--even here is passion, sentiment, futurity. The imagination involuntarily shapes out the fortunes of that disposition so legibly expressed in the speaking countenance. But in the deep meaning of the mild full eye, in the holy expression which beams in every lineament, in the spotless form, has not genius made the nearest approaches to our unbreathed conceptions of an infant Saviour! Regard that prophet--how glorious, yet how good, he seems! No spirit insensible to human woe, unpitying of human frailty, lives there. The errors and backslidings of his race have given a fixed though placid sorrow to the eye, but the closing sunshine of his own pure life hath settled on the majestic brow.