Colouring and design are to painting what metre and truth, or the fable, are to poetry; a body without soul. Poetry, says Aristotle, was first inspired with its soul, with fiction, by Homer; and with that the painter must animate his work. Design and colouring are the fruits of attention and practice: perspective and composition, in the strictest sense, are established on fixed rules; they are of course but mechanical; and, if I may be allowed the expression, only mechanical souls are wanting to understand and to admire them. Pleasures in general, save only those which rob the bulk of mankind of their invaluable treasure, time, become durable, and are free from tediousness and disgust, in proportion as they engage our intellectual faculties. Mere sensual sentiments soon languish; they do not influence our reason: such is the delight we take in the common landscape, flower, and fruit paintings: the artist, in performing them, thinks but very little; and the connoisseur, in considering them, thinks no more. A mere history-piece differs from a landscape only in the object: in the former you draw facts and persons, in the latter, sky, land, seas, &c. both, of course, being founded on the same principle, imitation, are essentially but of one kind. If it be not a contradiction to stretch the limits of painting, as far as those of poetry, and consequently, to allow the painter the same ability of elevating himself to the pitch of the poet as the musician enjoys; it is clear that history, though the sublimest branch of painting, cannot raise itself to the heighths of tragick or epick poetry, by imitation alone. Homer, as Cicero tells us[193], has transformed man into God: which is to say; he not only exceeded truth, but, to raise his fiction, preferred even the impossible, if probable, to the barely possible[194]. In this Aristotle fixes the very essence of poetry, and tells us that the pictures of Zeuxis had that characteristick. The possibility and truth, which Longinus requires of the painter, as opposites to absurdity in poetry, are not contradictory to this rule. This heighth the history-painter cannot reach, only by a contour above common nature, or a noble expression of the passions: for these are requisite in a good portrait-painter, who is able to execute them without diminishing the likeness of his model. They are but imitation, only prudently managed. The heads of Vandyke are charged with too exact an observation of nature; an exactness that would be faulty in a history-piece. Truth, lovely as it is in itself, charms more, penetrates deeper, when invested with fiction: fable, in its strictest sense, is the delight of childhood; allegory that of riper years. And the old opinion, that poetry was of earlier date than prose, as unanimously attested by the annals of different people, makes it evident, that even in the most barbarous times, truth was preferred, when appearing in this dress.