If ever an artist was endowed with beauty, and deep innate feelings for it; if ever one was versed in the taste and spirit of the ancients, ’twas certainly _Raphael_: yet are his beauties inferior to the most beautiful nature. I know persons more beautiful than his unequalled Madonna, in the _Palazzo Petti_ at Florence, or the Alcibiades in his academy. The Madonna in the Christmas-night of _Corregio_, (a piece justly celebrated for its chiar’-oscuro) is no sublime idea; still less so is that of _Maratta_ at Dresden: _Titian_’s celebrated Venus[327] in the Tribuna at Florence is common nature. The little heads of _Albano_ have an air of beauty; but it is a different thing to express beauty in little, and in great. To have the theory of navigation, and to guide a ship through the ocean, are two things. _Poussin_, who had studied antiquity more than his predecessors, knew perfectly well what his shoulders could bear, and never ventured into the great. The Greeks alone seem to have thrown forth beauty, as a potter makes his pot. The heads on all the coins of their Free-states have forms above nature, which they owe to the line that forms their profile. Would it not be easy to hit that line? Yet have all the numismatic compilers deviated from it. Might not _Raphael_, who complained of the scarcity of beauty, might not he have recurred to the coins of Syracuse, as the best statues, Laocoon alone excepted, were not yet discovered? Farther than those coins no mortal idea _can_ go. I wish my reader an opportunity of seeing the beautiful head of a genius in the Villa Borghese, and those images of unparalleled beauty, Niobe and her daughters. On the western side of the Alps he must be contented with gems and pastes. Two of the most beautiful youthful heads are a Minerva of Aspasius, now at Vienna, and a young Hercules in the Museum of the late Baron Stosch, at Florence. But let no man, who has not formed his taste upon antiquity, take it into his head to act the connoisseur of beauty: his ideas must be a parcel of whims. Of modern beauties I know none that could vie with the Greek female dancer of Mr. _Mengs_, big as life, painted in _Crayons_ on wood, for the Marquis Croimare at Paris, or with his Apollo amidst the muses, in the Villa Albano, to whom that of _Guido_ in the Aurora, compared, is but a mortal.