Arts have their infancy as well as men; they begin, as well as the artist, with froth and bombast: in such buskins the muse of Æschilus stalks, and part of the diction in his Agamemnon is more loaded with hyperboles than all Heraclitus’s nonsense. Perhaps the primitive Greek painters drew in the same manner that their first good tragedian thought in. In all human actions flutter and rashness precede, sedateness and solidity follow: but time only can discover, and the judicious will admire these only: they are the characteristics of great masters; violent passions run away with their disciples. The sages in the art know the difficulties hid under that air of easiness: _ut sibi quivis_ _Speret idem, sudet multum, frustraque laboret_ _Ausus idem._ Hor. _La Fage_, though an eminent designer, was not able to attain the purity of ancient taste. Every thing is animated in his works; they demand, and at the same time dissipate, your attention, like a company striving to talk all at once. This noble simplicity and sedate grandeur is also the true characteristical mark of the best and maturest Greek writings, of the epoch and school of _Socrates_. Possessed of these qualities _Raphael_ became eminently great, and he owed them to the ancients. That great soul of his, lodged in a beauteous body, was requisite for the first discovery of the true character of the ancients: he first felt all their beauties, and (what he was peculiarly happy in!) at an age when vulgar, unfeeling, and half-moulded souls overlook every higher beauty. Ye that approach his works, teach your eyes to be sensible of those beauties, refine your taste by the true antique, and then that solemn tranquillity of the chief figures in his _Attila_, deemed insipid by the vulgar, will appear to you equally significant and sublime. The Roman bishop, in order to divert the Hun from his design of assailing Rome, appears not with the air of a Rhetor, but as a venerable man, whose very presence softens uproar into peace; like him drawn by Virgil: _Tum pietate gravem ac meritis, si forte virum quem_ _Conspexere, silent, adrectisque auribus adstant:_ Æn. I. full of confidence in God, he faces down the barbarian: the two Apostles descend not with the air of slaughtering angels, but (if sacred may be compared with profane) like Jove, whose very nod shakes Olympus. _Algardi_, in his celebrated representation of the same story, done in bas-relief on an altar in St. Peter’s church at Rome, was either too negligent, or too weak, to give this active tranquillity of his great predecessor to the figures of his Apostles. There they appear like messengers of the Lord of Hosts: here like human warriors with mortal arms.