The aim of the epic painter is to impress one general idea, one great quality of nature or mode of society, some great maxim, without descending to those subdivisions, which the detail of character prescribes: he paints the elements with their own simplicity, height, depth, the vast, the grand, darkness, light; life, death; the past, the future; man, pity, love, joy, fear, terror, peace, war, religion, government: and the visible agents are only engines to force _one_ irresistible idea upon the mind and fancy, as the machinery of Archimedes served only to convey _destruction_, and the wheels of a watch serve only to tell _time_. Such is the first and general sense of what is called the _sublime_, epic, allegoric, lyric substance. Homer, to impress one forcible idea of _war_, its origin, its progress, and its end, set to work innumerable engines of various magnitude, yet none but what uniformly tends to enforce this and only this idea; gods and demigods are only actors, and nature but the scene of war; no character is discriminated but where discrimination discovers a new look of war; no passion is raised but what is blown up by the breath of war, and as soon absorbed in its universal blaze:--As in a conflagration we see turrets, spires, and temples illuminated only to propagate the horrors of destruction, so through the stormy page of Homer, we see his heroines and heroes but by the light that blasts them. This is the principle of that divine series of frescoes, with which under the pontificates of Julius II. and Paul III. Michael Angelo adorned the lofty compartments of the _Capella Sistina_, and from a modesty or a pride for ever to be lamented, only not occupied the _whole_ of its ample sides. Its subject is _theocracy_ or the empire of religion, considered as the parent and queen of man; the origin, the progress, and final dispensation of Providence, as taught by the sacred records. Amid this imagery of primeval simplicity, whose sole object is the relation of the race to its Founder, to look for minute discrimination of character, is to invert the principle of the artist's invention: here is only God with man. The veil of eternity is rent; time, space, and matter teem in the creation of the elements and of earth; life issues from God and adoration from man, in the creation of Adam and his mate; transgression of the precept at the tree of knowledge proves the origin of evil, and of expulsion from the immediate intercourse with God; the œconomy of justice and grace commences in the revolutions of the Deluge, and the covenant made with Noah; and the germs of social character are traced in the subsequent scene between him and his sons; the awful synod of prophets and sibyls are the heralds of the Redeemer, and the host of patriarchs the pedigree of the Son of Man; the brazen serpent and the fall of Haman, the giant subdued by the stripling in Goliath and David, and the conqueror destroyed by female