What has been said of the luxuriance of Poussin's scenery, leads to that intemperate abuse which allots it a greater space, a more conspicuous situation, a higher finish and effect than the importance of the subject itself permits--by which, unity is destroyed, and it becomes doubtful to what class a work belongs, whether it be a mixture of two or more, or all, where portrait with architecture, landscape with history for "mastery striving, each rules a moment." It cannot be denied that some of the noblest works of art are liable to this imputation, and that the fond admiration of the detailed beauties in the scenery of the Pietro Martire of Titian, if it does not detract from the main purpose for which the picture was or ought to have been painted, certainly adds nothing to its real interest--nature finishes all, but an attempt to mimic nature's universality palsies the hand of art; the celebrated "Cene," or Supper-Scenes of Paolo Cagliari can escape this imputation only by being classed as models of ornamental painting; and were it not known, that notwithstanding their grandeur, propriety, and pathos of composition, the Cartoons of Raffaello had been originally destined still more for popular amusement than the poised admiration of select judges, it would be difficult to excuse or to account for the exuberance, not seldom the impropriety of accompaniment and of scenery, with which some of them are loaded: in the Cartoon of the miraculous draught of fishes, perhaps Giovanni d'Udine would not have been allowed to treat us with fac-similes of the herons of the lake on its fore-ground; in that of Paul on the Areopagus, there would probably have been less agglomeration of finished, unfinished, or half demolished buildings; in the Miracle of Peter and John, the principal agents would scarcely have been hemmed in by a barbaric colonnade, loaded with profane ornament; or in the Massacre of the Infants, the humble cottages of Bethlehem been transformed to piles of Ionian architecture, girt with gods in intercolumnar niches, and the metropolitan pomp of Rome. FOOTNOTES: [80] The group in the Ludovisi, ever since its discovery, absurdly misnamed Pætus and Arria, notwithstanding some dissonance of taste and execution, may with more plausibility claim the title of Hæmon and Antigone.