principles as have heretofore guided his practice; let him follow nature, and these the noblest remains of art in existence, and he must excel. Sculpture seems especially calculated to flourish amongst us. The grave and manly character of the art agrees with the tone of national genius, harmonizes with our free institutions, and may find in our history sources of the brightest inspiration. THE FINE ARTS. PAINTING. CHAPTER X. IN the present undertaking, two methods of arrangement are obviously presented: either to treat the arts simultaneously; or, considering each in succession, to commence with that one which seemed best adapted to illustrate the history and common principles of all. With this view we have, in the commencement, followed the fortunes of Sculpture at some length, because here we find an uninterrupted series of monuments; here the elements of imitative art are discoverable in their purest and least compounded character; and also because in Sculpture the labours, being enduring, of greater magnitude, and more generally employed for national purposes than those of Painting, seem more clearly to illustrate the connexion which will ever be found to subsist between the refinement of taste and the progress of moral and political intelligence, as affects nations, or the human race universally. This is the truly dignified object in the history of the fine arts. In this respect our inquiries have been most satisfactorily resolved. We have found the state of sculpture an index of the moral and political condition of the people; owing its best cultivation to national and popular causes. We have seen it languish or revive according to the energy and the freedom of national institutions. The epochs of painting were nearly or altogether the same, as were also those of architecture. The conclusions, then, are universal. Little, therefore, remains to be explained in painting, save its own peculiarities as an individual art. Painting, which depends upon illusion for some of its most striking effects, and employs principles abstractly unreal, is, in the application of these principles, and in the full accomplishment of their effects, an art of greater difficulty than Sculpture. Hence, _a priori_, it might be inferred, that the former would more slowly attain to the perfection which it reached among the nations of the ancient world. But perhaps it would hardly have been predicted, that, in the age of Phidias, when sculpture had already been raised to an elevation yet unapproached, the sister art should still be little advanced. At the same time, there can be no doubt that the elements of both arts have in all countries sprung up together. Nature has sown the seed, but circumstances nourish the plants.