There are poems of his published, and in manuscript, that abound in meditations on sublime beauty: but you look in vain for it in his works.—Beauty, even the beauty of a God, wants Grace, and Moses, without it, from awful as he was, becomes only terrible. Immoderately fond of all that was extraordinary and difficult, he soon broke through the bounds of antiquity, grace, and nature; and as he panted for occasions of displaying skill only, he grew extravagant. His lying statues, on the ducal tombs of St. Lorenzo at Florence, have attitudes, which life, undistorted, cannot imitate: so careless was he, provided he might dazzle you with his mazy learning, of that decency, which nature and the place required, that to him we might apply, what a poet says of St. Lewis in hell: _Laissant le vray pour prendre la grimace,_ _Il fut toujours au delà de la Grace,_ _Et bien plus loin que les commandements._ He was blindly imitated by his disciples, and in them the want of Grace shocks you still more: for as they were far his inferiors in science, you have no equivalent at all. How little _Guilielmo della Porta_, the best of them all, understood grace and the antique, you may see in that marble groupe, called the Farnese-bull; where Dirce is his to the girdle. _John di Bologna_, _Algardi_, _Fiammingo_, are great names, but likewise inferior to the ancients, in Grace. At last _Lorenzo Bernini_ appeared, a man of spirit and superior talents, but whom Grace had never visited even in dreams. He aimed at encyclopædy in art; painter, architect, statuary, he struggled, chiefly as such, to become original. In his eighteenth year he produced his Apollo and Daphne; a work miraculous for those years, and promising that sculpture by him should attain perfection. Soon after he made his David, which fell short of Apollo. Proud of general applause, and sensible of his impotency, either to equal or to offuscate the antiques; he seems, encouraged by the dastardly taste of that age, to have formed the project of becoming a legislator in art, for all ensuing ages, and he carried his point. From that time the Graces entirely forsook him: how could they abide with a man who begun his career from the end opposite to the ancients? His forms he compiled from common nature, and his ideas from the inhabitants of climates unknown to him; for in Italy’s happiest parts nature differs from his figures. He was worshipped as the genius of art, and universally imitated; for, in our days, statues being erected to piety only, none to wisdom, a statue _à la Bernini_ is likelier to make the kitchen prosper than a Laocoon. From Italy, reader, I leave you to guess at other countries. A celebrated _Puget_, _Girardon_, with all his brethren in _On_, are worse. Judge of the connoisseurs of France by _Watelet_, and of its designers, by _Mariette_’s gems.