objection to giving every part with the utmost perfection, as it is given in a looking-glass. But if we have only a month to do a portrait in, is it not better to give three weeks to the face and one to the dress, than one week to the face and three to the dress. How often do we look at the face compared to the dress? ‘On a good foundation,’ says Sancho Panza, ‘a good house may be built’; so a good picture should have a good back-ground, and be finished in every part. It is entitled to this mark of respect, which is like providing a frame for it, and hanging it in a good light. I can easily understand how Rubens or Vandyke finished the back grounds and drapery of their pictures:—they were worth the trouble; and, besides, it cost them nothing. It was to them no more than blowing a bubble in the air. One would no doubt have every thing right—a feather in a cap, or a plant in the foreground—if a thought or a touch would do it. But to labour on for ever, and labour to no purpose, is beyond mortal or English patience. Our clumsiness is one cause of our negligence. Depend upon it, people do with readiness what they can do well. I rather wonder, therefore, that Raphael took such pains in finishing his draperies and back grounds, which he did so indifferently. The expression is like an emanation of the soul, or like a lamp shining within and illuminating the whole face and body; and every part, charged with so sacred a trust as the conveying of this expression (even to the hands and feet), would be wrought up to the highest perfection. But his inanimate objects must have cost him some trouble; and yet he laboured them too. In what he could not do well, he was still determined to do his best; and that nothing should be wanting in decorum and respect to an art that he had consecrated to virtue, and to that genius that burnt like a flame upon its altars! We have nothing that for myself I can compare with this high and heroic pursuit of art for its own sake. The French fancy their own pedantic abortions equal to it, thrust them into the Louvre, ‘and with their darkness dare affront that light!’—thus proving themselves without the germ or the possibility of excellence—the feeling of it in others. We at least claim some interest in art, by looking up to its loftiest monuments—retire to a distance, and reverence the sanctuary, if we cannot enter it. ‘They also serve who only stare and wait.’[40] ON PERSONAL IDENTITY _The Monthly Magazine._] [_January, 1828._ ‘Ha! here be three of us sophisticated.’—LEAR.