the manner of Kneller swept completely what yet might be left of taste under his successors: such was the equally contemptible and deplorable state of English art, till the genius of Reynolds first rescued from the mannered depravation of foreigners his own branch, and soon extending his view to the higher departments of art, joined that select body of artists who addressed the ever open ear, ever attentive mind of our Royal Founder, with the first idea of this establishment. His beneficence soon gave it a place and a name, his august patronage, sanction, and individual encouragement: the annually increased merits of thirty exhibitions in this place, with the collateral ones contrived by the speculations of commerce, have told the surprising effects: a mass of self-taught and tutored powers burst upon the general eye, and unequivocally told the world what might be expected from the concurrence of public encouragement--how far this has been or may be granted or withheld, it is not here my province to surmise: the plans lately adopted and now organizing within these walls for the dignified propagation and support of art, whether fostered by the great, or left to their own energy, must soon decide what may be produced by the unison of British genius and talent, and whether the painters' school of that nation which claims the foremost honours of modern poetry, which has produced with Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Wilson, shall submit to content themselves with a subordinate place among the schools we have enumerated. FOOTNOTES: [27] See the account of this in Vasari; vita di P. Brunelleschi, tom. ii. 114. It is of wood, and still exists in the chapel of the family Gondi, in the church of S. Maria Novella. I know that near a century before Donato, Giotto is said to have worked in marble two basso-relievoes on the campanile of the cathedral of Florence; they probably excel the style of his pictures as much as the bronze works executed by Andrea Pisani, from his designs, at the door of the Battisterio. [28] Masaccio da S. Giovanni di Valdarno born in 1402, is said to have died in 1443. He was the pupil of Masolino da Panicale. [29] Andrea Mantegna died at Mantoua, 1505. A monument erected to his memory in 1517, by his sons, gave rise to the mistake of dating his death from that period. [30] Luca Signorelli died at Cortona 1521, aged 82. [31] Lionardo da Vinci is said to have died in 1517, aged 75, at Paris.