another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or _Taste_, presupposes a comparative knowledge of things themselves: that colour, grace, and taste are companions, not substitutes of form, expression, and character, and, when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid faults. This precision of hand and eye presupposed, we now come to its application and object, Imitation, which rests on Nature. Imitation is properly divided into Iconic and Ideal. Iconic imitation is confined to an individuum or model, whose parts it delineates according to their character and essence, already distinguishing the native and inherent, from the accidental and adventitious parts. By the first it forms its standard, and either omits or subordinates the second to them, so as not to impede or to affect the harmony of a whole. This is properly the province of the Portrait and the strictly Historic painter, whose chief object and essential requisite is Truth. Portrait in general, content to be directed by the rules of Physiognomy, which shows the animal being it represents at rest, seldom calls for aid on Pathognomy, which exhibits that being agitated, or at least animated and in motion; but when it does--and, though in a gentler manner than History, it always ought to do it--it differs in nothing from that, but in extent and degree, and already proceeds on the firm _permanent basis of_ NATURE. By Nature, I understand the general and permanent principles of visible objects, not disfigured by accident or distempered by disease, not modified by fashion or local habits. Nature is a collective idea, and though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never _in its perfection_ inhabit a _single_ object: our ideas are the offspring of our senses; without a previous knowledge of many _central_ forms, though we may copy, we can no more imitate, or, in other words, rise to the principle of action and penetrate the character of our model, than we can hope to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we have. Meanness of manner is the infallible consequence that results from the exclusive recourse to one model: why else are those who have most closely adhered to, and most devoutly studied the model, exactly the most incorrect, the most remote from the real human form? Can there be any thing more disgusting to an eye accustomed to harmony of frame, than the starveling forms of Albert Durer, unless it be the swampy excrescences of Rembrandt? the figures of the former, proportions without symmetry; those of the Dutch artist, uniform abstracts of lumpy or meagre deformity: and yet the German was a scientific man, had measured, had in his opinion reduced to principles, the human frame; whilst the Dutchman, form only excepted, possessed every power that constitutes genius in art, seldom excelled in invention and composition, and the creator of that magic combination of colour