After him the sublimest performance undertaken and finished, in that kind, is, no doubt, the cupola of the imperial library at Vienna, painted by _Daniel Gran_, and engraved by _Sedelmayer_. The Apotheosis of Hercules at Versailles, done by _Le Moine_, and alluding to the Cardinal _Hercules de Fleury_, though deemed in France the most august of compositions, is, in comparison of the learned and ingenious performance of the German artist, but a very mean and short-sighted Allegory, resembling a panegyric, the most striking beauties of which are relative to the almanack. The artist had it in his power to indulge grandeur, and his flipping the occasion is astonishing: but even allowing, that the Apotheosis of a minister was all that he ought to have decked the chief cieling of a royal palace with, we nevertheless see through his fig-leaf. The artist would require a work, containing every image with which any abstracted idea might be poetically inverted; a work collected from all mythology, the best poets of all ages, the mysterious philosophy of different nations, the monuments of the ancients on gems, coins, utensils, &c. This magazine should be distributed into several classes, and, with proper applications to peculiar possible cases, adapted to the instruction of the artist. This would, at the same time, open a vast field for imitating the ancients, and participating of their sublimer taste. The taste in our decorations, which, since the complaints of _Vitruvius_, hath changed for the worse, partly by the grotesques brought in vogue by _Morto da Feltro_, partly by our trifling house-painting, might also, from more intimacy with the ancients, reap the advantages of reality and common sense. The Caricatura-carvings, and favourite shells, those chief supports of our ornaments, are full as unnatural as the candle-sticks of _Vitruvius_, with their little castles and palaces: how easy would it be, by the help of Allegory, to give some learned convenience to the smallest ornament! _Reddere personæ scit convenientia cuique._ Hor. Paintings of ceilings, doors, and chimney-pieces, are commonly but the expletives of these places, because they cannot be gilt all over. Not only they have not the least relation to the rank and circumstances of the proprietor, but often throw some ridicule or reflection upon him. ’Tis an abhorrence of barrenness that fills walls and rooms; and pictures void of thought must supply the vacuum. Hence the artist, abandoned to the dictates of his own fancy, paints, for want of Allegory, perhaps a satire on him to whom he owes his industry; or, to shun this Charybdis, finds himself reduced to paint figures void of any meaning. Nay, he may often find it difficult to meet even with those, ’till at last ——_velut ægri Somnia, vanæ Finguntur Species._ Hor. Thus Painting is degraded from its most eminent prerogative, the representation of invisible, past and future things.