where he watched the dim shadows cast by his dying embers on the wall, or at other times saw the clouds driven before the storm, or the blaze of noon-day brightness bursting through his casement on the mysterious gloom which surrounded him. What a pity that his old master could not have received a friendly hint from Sir Joshua, that getting rid of his vulgar musty prejudices, he might have set out betimes for the regions of _virtù_, have scaled the ladder of taste, have measured the antique, lost himself in the Vatican, and after ‘wandering through dry places, seeking he knew not what, and finding nothing,’ have returned home as great a critic and painter as so many others have done! Of Titian, Vandyke, or Correggio we shall say nothing here, as we have said so much in another place. A theory, then, by which these great artists could have been lost to themselves and to the art, and which explains away the two chief supports and sources of all art, _nature_ and _genius_, into an unintelligible jargon of words, cannot be intrinsically true. The principles thus laid down may be very proper to conduct the machinery of a royal academy, or to precede the distribution of prizes to the students, or to be the topics of assent and congratulation among the members themselves at their annual exhibition dinner: but they are so far from being calculated to foster genius or to direct its course, that they can only blight or mislead it, wherever it exists, and ‘lose more men of talents to this nation,’ by the dissemination of false principles, than have been already lost to it by the want of any.