Let us, however, make some exception in favour of Fiamingo’s children. For, lustiness and full health being the common burden of the praises of children, whose infant forms are not strictly susceptible of that beauty, which belongs to the steadiness of riper years; the imitation of his children has reasonably become a fashion among our artists. But neither this, nor the indulgence of the academy at Vienna, can be, or indeed was meant to be decisive, in favour of the modern children; it only leads us to make a distinction. The ancients went beyond nature, even in their children: the moderns only follow her; and, provided their infant forms, exuberant as they are, do not influence their ideas of youthful and riper bodies, they may be allowed to be in the right, though, at the same time, the ancients were not in the wrong. Our artists are, likewise, at full liberty to dress the hair of their figures as they please: but, being so fond of nature, they, must needs know, that it is nature which shades, with pendant locks, the forehead and temples of all those, whose life is not spent between the comb and the looking-glass: and finding this manner carefully observed in most statues of the ancients, they may take it as a proof of their attachment to simplicity and truth; a proof of the more weight, as they did not want people, busier in adorning their bodies than their minds, and as nice in adjusting their hair, as the most elegant of our European courtiers. But it was commonly looked upon as a mark of an ingenuous and noble extraction, to dress the hair in the manner of the statues[181]. The imitation of the ancient contour has indeed never been rejected, not even by those whose chief want was that of correctness: but we differ about imitating that “noble simplicity and sedate grandeur” in their works. An expression which hath seldom met with general approbation, and never pronounced without hazard of being misunderstood. In the Hercules of Bandinelli, the idea of it was deemed a fault[182]: an usurpation in Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents[183]. The idea of “nature at rest,” I own, might, perhaps, produce figures like the young Spartans of Xenophon; nor would the bulk of mankind be better pleased with performances in the taste of my treatise, (supposing even all its precepts authorised by the judges of the art) than with a speech made before the Areopagites. But it is not on the bulk of mankind that we ought to confer the legislative power in the art. And though works of an extensive composition ought certainly to have the support of a vigour and spirit proportioned to their extent, yet there are limits which must not be overleapt: use not so much spirit as to represent the everlasting Father like the cruel God of war, or an ecstasied saint like a priestess of Bacchus.