from Paradise, by Raphael, still own Masaccio for its inventor, he can scarcely be said to have furnished more than the hint of that enthusiasm and energy which we admire in Paul on the Areopagus: in the picture of the covenant with Noah, the sublimity of the vision, and the graces of the mother entangled by her babes, find their originals in the Sistine Chapel, but they are equalled by the fervour which conceived the Patriarch, who, with the infant pressed to his bosom, with folded hands, and prostrate on his knees, adores. What figure or what gesture in the Cartoon of Pisa has not been imitated? Raphael, Parmegiano, Poussin, are equally indebted to it; in the Sacrament of Baptism, the last did little more than transcribe that knot of powers, the fierce feature of the veteran, who, eager to pull on his clothes, pushes his foot through the rending garment.--Such are the indulgences which invention grants to fancy, taste, and judgment. But a limited fragment of observations must not presume to exhaust what in itself is inexhaustible; the features of invention are multiplied before me as my powers decrease: I shall therefore no longer trespass on your patience, than by fixing your attention for a few moments on one of its boldest flights, the transfiguration of Raphael; a performance equally celebrated and censured; in which the most judicious of inventors, the painter of propriety, is said to have not only wrestled for extent of information with the historian, but attempted to leap the boundaries, and, with a less discriminating than daring hand, to remove the established limits of the art, to have arbitrarily combined two actions, and consequently two different moments. Were this charge founded, I might content myself with observing, that the Transfiguration, more than any other of Raphael's oil-pictures, was a public performance, destined by Julio de Medici, afterward Clement VII. for his archi-episcopal church at Narbonne; that it was painted in contest with Sebastian del Piombo, assisted in his rival picture of Lazarus by Michael Angelo; and thus, considering it as framed on the simple principles of the monumental style, established in my first discourse on the pictures of Polygnotus at Delphi, I might frame a plausible excuse for the modern artist; but Raphael is above the assistance of subterfuge, and it is sufficient to examine the picture, in order to prove the futility of the charge. Raphael has connected with the transfiguration not the _cure_ of the maniac, but his _presentation for it_; if, according to the [78]Gospel record, this happened at the foot of the mountain, whilst the apparition took place at the top, what improbability is there in assigning the _same moment_ to both?