It is not for me, (who have courted and still continue to court Colour as a despairing lover courts a disdainful mistress,) to presume, by adding my opinion, to degrade the great one delivered; but the attachments of fancy ought not to regulate the motives of a teacher, or direct his plan of art: it becomes me therefore to tell you, that if the principle which animates the art gives rights and privilege to Colour not its own; if from a medium, it raises it to a representative of all; if what is claimed in vain by form and mind, it fondly grants to colour; if it divert the public eye from higher beauties to be absorbed by its lures--then the art is degraded to a mere vehicle of sensual pleasure, an implement of luxury, a beautiful _but trifling_ bauble, or a splendid fault. To Colour, when its bland purity tinges the face of innocence and sprouting life, or its magic charm traces in imperceptible transitions the forms of beauty; when its warm and ensanguined vigour stamps the vivid principle that animates full-grown youth and the powerful frame of manhood, or in paler gradations marks animal decline; when its varieties give truth with character to individual imitation, or its more comprehensive tone pervades the scenes of sublimity and expression, and dictates the medium in which they ought to move, to strike our eye in harmony;--to Colour, the florid attendant of form, the minister of the passions, the herald of energy and character, what eye, not tinged by disease or deserted by Nature, refuses homage? But of Colour, when equally it overwhelms the forms of infancy, the milky germ of life, and the defined lines of manhood and of beauty with lumpy pulp; when from the dresser of the Graces it becomes the handmaid of deformity, and with their spoils decks her limbs--shakes hands with meanness, or haunts the recesses of loathsomeness and horror[98]--when it exchanges flesh for roses, and vigour for vulgarity--absorbs character and truth in hues of flattery, or changes the tone demanded by sublimity and pathos into a mannered medium of playful tints;--of Colour the slave of fashion and usurper of propriety, if still its charms retain our eye, what mind unseduced by prejudice or habit can forbear to lament the abuse? The principles of Colour, as varied, are as immutable as those of Nature. The gradations of the system that connects _light_ with _shade_ are immense, but the variety of its imitation is regulated by the result of their union, Simplicity--Clearness if obtained by Harmony! Simplicity represents of every individual its unity, its whole. Light, and its organ the eye, show us the whole of a being before its parts, and then diffuse themselves in visual rays over the limbs. Light with its own velocity fixes a point, the focus of its power; but as no central light can be conceived without radiation, nor a central form without extension, their union produces that immutable law of harmony which we call breadth.