Compared with itself, and with the real objects and essence of art, we have already pointed out the great defect in the practice of English art to be, imperfection in the details. In portraiture, this has spread to a ruinous extent; and with the most beautiful models in the world, British female portraits, speaking in general, are most decided failures. On this subject, nothing more remains to be said--we refer to the exquisite works of Lawrence, whose female heads are at once most striking, most lovely, and very highly finished;--we recommend a study of Vandyke's likenesses of the ladies of the Court of Charles, now in the Louvre. Let the natural grace and modesty, the delicacy of feature and transparency of tint, in these, be compared with similar works of the present day and practice--when it must at once appear how much is lost to art, and how great injustice is done to nature. In male portraits our practice is better, but only from the bolder lineaments of the subject. The inherent errors are the same--modelling with the pencil, rather than drawing--immense masses of dark shade to conceal the absence of all that should be present--and forcible rather than natural effect. There certainly now appears, however, in the productions of the most esteemed living masters, the progress of a more scientific and more perfect style. In the walk of history, expression--that expression which comes from the natural outpourings of feeling--which animates the canvass of the early masters--and which seems to find its proper, spontaneous, accordant instrument in their pencil,--has yet been wanting. Next, our historical paintings are sadly defective in composition--not in the symmetrical arrangement and grouping of figures, but in the real poetry of the art, in the facile, the creative power over the means and materials of the science--in the skill of causing them to fall as if by chance, and without effort or visible design, into the most harmonious, most striking, and most effective combinations. Another and a principal source of inferiority--of absolute, yet laborious error, has been the most mistaken perceptions of ideal beauty in art. This subject it was our intention to have treated here at some length. Our limits, however, forbid, while it is of less consequence, since the volume contains within itself the leading precepts on this topic. The sum of these separate remarks is, that the ideal is not beauty apart from, but wrought out of nature. So far from being the creation of fancy, it lives, breathes, and is to be found only in nature. In this important principle, juster ideas are beginning rapidly to diffuse their influence over the whole of our art, since theory has been laid aside, and nature, and the antique, and real taste have regained the ascendency. THE FINE ARTS. ARCHITECTURE. CHAPTER XV.