It may with equal justice be asserted of the fine arts, as of the belles lettres, that they never long remain in the same state, and that they experience often great changes even in the common period assigned to the life of man. Many causes contribute to this; public calamities, such as I mentioned to have occurred after the death of Raffaello; the instability of the human mind, which in the arts as in dress is guided by fashion and the love of novelty; the influence of particular artists; the taste of the great, who from their selection or patronage of particular masters, silently indicate the path to those artists who seek the gifts of fortune. These and other causes tended to produce the decline of painting in Rome towards the close of the seventeenth century, at a time too when literature began to revive; a clear proof that they are not mutually progressive. This was in a great measure occasioned by the calamitous events which afflicted Rome and the state, about the middle of that century; by the feuds of the nobles, the flight of the Barberini family, and other unfortunate circumstances, which, during the pontificate of Innocent X., as we are informed by Passeri, (p. 321,) rendered the employment of artists very precarious; but more than all the dreadful plague of 1655, under Alexander VII. To this state of decay too the evil passions of mankind contributed in no small degree, and these indeed in all revolutions are among the most active and predominant sources of evil, and often even in a prosperous state of things sow the seeds of future calamities.