There is one other important step left towards the atchievement of the art: but the artist, who, boldly forsaking the common path, dares to attempt it, finds himself at once on the brink of a precipice, and starts back dismayed. The stories of martyrs and saints, fables and metamorphoses, are almost the only objects of modern painters—repeated a thousand times, and varied almost beyond the limits of possibility, every tolerable judge grows sick at them. The judicious artist falls asleep over a Daphne and Apollo, a Proserpine carried off by Pluto, an Europa, &c. he wishes for occasions to shew himself a poet, to produce significant images, to paint Allegory. Painting goes beyond the senses: _there_ is its most elevated pitch, to which the Greeks strove to raise themselves, as their writings evince. Parrhasius, like Aristides, a painter of the soul, was able to express the character even of a whole people: he painted the Athenians as mild as cruel, as fickle as steady, as brave as timid. Such a representation owes its possibility only to the allegorical method, whose images convey general ideas. But here the artist is lost in a desart. Tongues the most savage, which are entirely destitute of abstracted ideas, containing no word whose sense could express memory, space, duration, &c. these tongues, I say, are not more destitute of general signs, than painting in our days. The painter who thinks beyond his palette longs for some learned apparatus, by whose stores he might be enabled to invest abstracted ideas with sensible and meaning images. Nothing has yet been published of this kind, to satisfy a rational being; the essays hitherto made are not considerable, and far beneath this great design. The artist himself knows best in what degree he is satisfied with Ripa’s Iconology, and the emblems of ancient nations, by Van Hooghe. Hence the greatest artists have chosen but vulgar objects. _Annibal Caracci_, instead of representing in general symbols and sensible images the history of the Farnesian family, as an allegorical poet, wasted all his skill in fables known to the whole world. Go, visit the galleries of monarchs, and the publick repositories of art, and see what difference there is between the number of allegorical, poetical, or even historical performances, and that of fables, saints, or madonnas. Among great artists, _Rubens_ is the most eminent, who first, like a sublime poet, dared to attempt this untrodden path. His most voluminous composition, the gallery of Luxembourg, has been communicated to the world by the hands of the best engravers.