_The Morning Chronicle._] [_February 5, 1814._ The exhibition of this year is, we think, upon the whole, inferior to the one or two last exhibitions; for though the historical department is quite as respectably filled, there is not the same proportion of pleasing representations of common life, and natural scenery. In spite of certain classical prejudices, we should be sorry to see this which has been the most successful walk of the modern English school, neglected for the pursuit of prize-medals and _epic mottos_, which look well in the catalogue. There is indeed a greater difference between an historical picture, and a picture of an historical subject, than even some eminent painters seem to have imagined. But we are, we confess, so little refined in our taste, as to prefer a good imitation of common nature to a bad imitation of the highest, or rather to an imitation of nothing. Many of the pictures exhibited by young artists at this Institution, have shewn a capacity for correct and happy delineation of actual objects and domestic incidents, perhaps only inferior to the master-pieces of the Dutch school, from the use of a less perfect vehicle, and the want of long practice, steadily and uniformly directed to the same object. But in the higher, and what is rather affectedly called the epic style of art,—in giving the movements of the loftier and more violent passions, this country has not a single painter to boast, who has made even a faint approach to the excellence of the great Italian painters. We have indeed a good number of specimens of the clay-figure, the bones and muscles of the man, the anatomical mechanism, the regular proportions measured by a two-foot rule—large canvasses covered with stiff figures arranged in decent order, with the characters and story correctly expressed by uplifted eyes or hands, according to old receipt-books for the passions, and with all the hardness and inflexibility of figures carved in wood, and painted over in good strong body colours, that look as if some of nature’s journeymen had made them, and not made them well. But we still want a Prometheus to give life to the cumbrous mass, to throw an intellectual light over the opaque image, to embody the inmost refinements of thought to the outward eye, to lay bare the very soul of passion. That picture is of little comparative value, which can be completely _translated_ into another language, of which the description in a common catalogue is as good, and conveys all that is expressed by the picture itself; for it is the excellence of every art to give what can be given by no other, in the same degree. Much less is that picture to be esteemed which only injures and defaces the idea already existing in the mind’s eye, which does not come up to the conception which the imagination forms of the subject, and substitutes a dull reality for high sentiment; for the art is in this