Novelty and feelings will make the rigid historian sometimes launch out into the marvellous, or warm his bosom and extort a tear; the dramatist, in gazing at some tremendous feature, or the pomp of superior agency, will drop the chain of sympathy and be absorbed in the sublime; whilst the epic or lyric painter forgets his solitary grandeur, sometimes descends and mixes with his agents. Thus Homer gave the feature of the drama in Hector and Andromache, in Irus and Ulysses; the spirit from the prison-house stalks like the shade of Ajax, in Shakspeare; the daughter of Soranus pleading for her father, and Octavia encircled by centurions, melt like Ophelia and Alceste, in Tacitus; thus Raphael personified the genius of the river in Joshua's passage through the Jordan, and again at the ceremony of Solomon's inauguration; and thus Poussin raised before the scared eye of Coriolanus, the frowning vision of Rome, all armed, with her attendant, Fortune. These general excursions from one province of the art into those of its congenial neighbours, granted by judicious invention to the artist, let me apply to the grant of a more specific licence[77]: Horace, the most judicious of critics, when treating on the use of poetic words, tells his pupils, that the adoption of an old word, rendered novel by a skilful construction with others, will entitle the poet to the praise of original diction. The same will be granted to the judicious adoption of figures in art. Far from impairing the originality of invention, the unpremeditated discovery of an appropriate attitude or figure in the works of antiquity, or of the great old masters after the revival, and its adoption, or the apt transposition of one misplaced in some inferior work, will add lustre to a performance of commensurate or superior power, by a kind coalition with the rest, immediately furnished by nature and the subject. In such a case it is easily discovered whether a subject have been chosen merely to borrow an idea, an attitude or figure, or whether their eminent fitness procured them their place. An adopted idea or figure in a work of genius is a foil or a companion of the rest; but an idea of genius borrowed by mediocrity, tears all associate shreds, it is the giant's thumb by which the pigmy offered the measure of his own littleness. We stamp the plagiary on the borrower, who, without fit materials or adequate conceptions of his own, seeks to shelter impotence under purloined vigour; we leave him with the full praise of invention, who by the harmony of a whole proves that what he adopted might have been his own offspring though anticipated by another. If he take now, he soon may give. Thus Michael Angelo scattered the Torso of Apollonius in every view, in every direction, in groups and single figures, over the composition of the Last Judgment; and in the Lunetta of Judith and her Maid gave an original turn to figures adopted from the gem of Pier Maria da Pescia: if the figure of Adam dismissed