Without pretending to be able to trace this principle of rest to more than a very limited distance, and in a very few examples, I think it is worth notice in a time when art generally is characterised by a want of that repose which until recent times has especially “marked the manners of the great.” Look through the National Gallery, and few pictures will be found which would not add a grace of peace to the house they were hung in, no matter how wild the subject or passionate the motive. Step into an Academy Exhibition, and there will scarcely be discovered a dozen canvases in a thousand which, however skilful and in many respects admirable they may be, would not constitute points of _un_rest, if they were in daily and hourly sight. It is the same with nearly all modern poetry, sculpture, and architecture; and if it is not true of music, it is because music absolutely cannot exist without some reference to a point or points of rest, in keynote, fundamental strain, or reiterated refrain. It might at first be supposed that, in a picture, this point should be that on which the eye should repose in order to bring the remainder into focal proportion; and this is true with regard to those painters who paint on the theory that the eye is fixed, and not roving in its regard. But this theory has never been that of the greatest times of art. Crome, Constable, and Gainsborough’s landscapes do not fade off from a certain point on which the eye is supposed to be fixed; yet there will usually be found some point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it involuntarily returns for repose. The most noteworthy remark to be made about this point of rest is, that it is not in itself the most but the least interesting point in the whole work. It is the _punctum indifferens_ to which all that is interesting is more or less unconsciously referred. In an elaborate landscape it may be--as it is in one of Constable’s--the sawn-off end of a branch of a tree: or a piece of its root, as it is in one of Michael Angelo’s pieces in the Sistine Chapel. In the Dresden “Madonna” of Raphael it is the heel of the Infant. No one who has not given some thought to the subject can have any idea of the value of these apparently insignificant points in the pictures in which they occur, unless he tries the experiment of doing away with them. Cover them from sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life of the picture will be found to have been lowered.