It will, we suppose, be objected that this, though history and invention, is not high history, or poetical invention. We would answer then at once by appealing to Shakespeare. It will be allowed that his characters are poetical as well as natural; yet the individual portrait is almost as striking as the general expression of nature and passion. It is this and this only which distinguishes him from the French school. Dr. Johnson, proceeding on the same theoretical principles as his friend Sir Joshua, affirms, that the excellence of Shakespeare’s characters consists in their generality. We grant in one sense it does; but we will add that it consists in their particularity also. Are the admirable descriptions of the kings of Thrace and Inde in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, less poetical or historical, or ideal, because they are distinguished by traits as characteristic as they are striking;—in their lineaments, their persons, their armour, their other attributes, the one black and broad, the other tall, and fair, and freckled, with yellow crisped locks that glittered as the sun. The four white bulls, and the lions which accompany them are equally fine, but they are not fine because they present no distinct image to the mind. The effect of this is somehow lost in Dryden’s Palamon and Arcite, and the poetry is lost with it. Much more is it necessary to combine individuality with the highest works of art in painting, ‘whose end and use both at the first, now is, and was, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature.’ The painter gives the degree and peculiarity of expression where words in a manner leave off, and if he does not go beyond mere abstraction, he does nothing. The cartoons of Raphael, and his pictures in the Vatican, are sufficiently historical, yet there is hardly a face or figure in any of them which is anything more than fine and individual nature finely disposed. The late Mr. Barry, who could not be suspected of a prejudice on this side of the question, speaks thus of them,—‘In Raphael’s pictures (at the Vatican) of the Dispute of the Sacrament and the School of Athens, one sees all the heads to be entirely copied from particular characters in nature, nearly proper for the persons and situation which he adapts them to; and he seems to me only to add and take away what may answer his purpose in little parts, features, &c.: conceiving, while he had the head before him, ideal characters and expressions, which he adapts these features and peculiarities of face to. This attention to the particulars which distinguish all the different faces, persons and characters, the one from the other, gives his pictures quite the verity and unaffected dignity of nature, which stamp the distinguishing differences betwixt one man’s face and body and another’s.’