especial homage), he could not have been sincere in acknowledging so thorough a conviction of their excellence. To decide fairly on this difficult and often-discussed point, it is necessary to remember the state of the arts when Reynolds formed his style. The great vice of the age was a routine practice, seldom informed by any reference to the general nature of the art, and as little remarkable for a just discrimination of its various styles. In such a state of things it cannot excite surprise that a sagacious and unprejudiced mind, in endeavouring to retrace the leading principles of the art, should at the same time see the necessity of modifying them in their application to a particular, and in some respects a limited, department. As portrait painting, the imitation of individuals, was to be Reynolds’s chief occupation, it certainly did not occur to him that the abstract representations of Michael Angelo, or even of Raffaelle, could be fit models for him to follow, as far as execution was concerned. He saw however that these masters were probably right even in this respect, when the dignity and purity of their aim, and when subject, place, and dimensions are duly considered. His imitation of them therefore began when he endeavoured to define the end and object of the particular style of art which he himself professed; and although he soon concluded that it required a widely different treatment, he failed not to translate, if we may so say, the causes of the grandeur he admired into the language which belonged to his own department. What he considered the distinctive and desirable requisites of portrait painting to consist in, may be best learnt from his own works. In the first place, the more delicate refinements of colouring and chiaro-scuro, by no means essential in the grander and more abstract department of the art, are indispensable where the imitation is confined to a single and generally a defective person. It is thus that Rembrandt made up the _sum_ of beauty by the fascinations of gradation and contrast, while the forms he had to deal with were often of the most ordinary description. The just imitation of the colour of flesh, the most beautiful and at the same time the most nameless hue in nature, has ever been considered the triumph of imitative art, and confers value and dignity on the _work_ wherever it is fully accomplished. Again, it must be remembered that the domain of expression begins with the accidents of form; that it belongs to and often recommends individuality and redeems deformity; and that its vivid interest is to be sought less in the abstract personifications of Michael Angelo, far less in the higher region of beauty which the Greeks justly placed above the atmosphere of the passions, than in the varieties of accidental nature. Reynolds seized on the delicacies of expression as strictly harmonizing with the individual forms he had to copy: and, while thus adding a charm to his class of art, he became at