better to proceed, and not spoil the picture. The ambiguity becomes more striking in painting from the naked figure. If the wonder occasioned by the object is greater, so is the despair of rivalling what we see. The sense of responsibility increases with the hope of creating an artificial splendour to match the real one. The display of unexpected charm foils our vanity, and mortifies passion. The painting _A Diana and Nymphs_ is like plunging into a cold bath of desire: to make a statue of a _Venus_ transforms the sculptor himself to stone. The snow on the lap of beauty freezes the soul. The heedless, unsuspecting licence of foreign manners gives the artist abroad an advantage over ours at home. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted only the head of Iphigene from a beautiful woman of quality: Canova had innocent girls to sit to him for his Graces. The Princess Borghese, whose symmetry of form was admirable, sat to him for a model, which he considered as his master-piece and the perfection of the female form; and when asked if she did not feel uncomfortable while it was taking, she replied with great indifference, ‘No: it was not cold!’ I have but one other word to add on this part of the subject: if having to paint a delicate and modest female is a temptation to gallantry, on the other hand the sitting to a lady for one’s picture is a still more trying situation, and amounts (almost of itself) to a declaration of love! Landscape-painting is free from these tormenting dilemmas and embarrassments. It is as full of the feeling of pastoral simplicity and ease, as portrait-painting is of personal vanity and egotism. Away then with those incumbrances to the true liberty of thought—the sitter’s chair, the bag-wig and sword, the drapery, the lay figure—and let us to some retired spot in the country, take out our port-folio, plant our easel, and begin. We are all at once shrouded from observation— ‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot!’ We enjoy the cool shade, with solitude and silence; or hear the dashing waterfall, ‘Or stock-dove plain amid the forest deep, That drowsy rustles to the sighing gale.’