When Poussin represented Coriolanus in the Volscian camp, he placed before him in suppliant attitude his mother, wife, and children, with a train of Roman matrons kneeling, and behind them the erect and frowning form of an armed female, accompanied by another with streaming hair, recumbent on a wheel. On these two, unseen to all else, Coriolanus, perplexed in the extreme, in an attitude of despair, his sword half drawn, as if to slay himself, fixes his scared eyes: who discovers not that he is in a trance, and in the female warrior recognises the tutelary genius of Rome, and her attendant Fortune, to terrify him into compliance? Shall we disgrace with the frigid conceit of an allegory the powerful invention which disclosed to the painter's eye the agitation in the Roman's breast and the proper moment for fiction? Who is not struck by the sublimity of a vision which, without diminishing the credibility of the fact, adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him submit not to the impulse of private ties, but to the imperious destiny of his country? Among the paltry subterfuges contrived by dulness to palliate the want of invention, the laborious pedantry of emblems ranks foremost, by which arbitrary and conventional signs have been substituted for character and expression. If the assertion of S. Johnson, that the plastic arts "can illustrate, but cannot inform," be false as a general maxim, it gains an air of truth with regard to this hieroglyphic mode of exchanging substance for signs; and the story which he adds in proof, of a young girl's mistaking the usual figure of Justice with a steel-yard for a cherry-woman, becomes here appropriate. The child had seen many stall and market-women, and always with a steel-yard or a pair of scales, but never a figure of Justice; and it might as well be pretended that one not initiated in the Egyptian mysteries should discover in the Scarabæus of an obelisk the summer solstice, as that a child, a girl, or a man not acquainted with Cæsar Ripa, or some other emblem-coiner, should find in a female holding a balance over her eyes, in another with a bridle in her hand, in a third leaning on a broken pillar, and in a fourth loaded with children, the symbols of Justice, Temperance, Fortitude and Charity. If these signs be at all admissible, they ought, at least, to receive as much light from the form, the character, and expression of the figures they accompany, as they reflect on them, else they become burlesque, instead of being attributes. Though this rage for emblem did not become epidemic before the lapse of the sixteenth century, when the Cavalieri of the art, the Zucchari, Vasari and Porta's undertook to deliver more work than their brains could furnish with thought, yet even the philosophers of the art, in the classic days of Julio and Leo, cannot be said to have been entirely free from it. What analogy is there between an ostrich at the side of a female with a balance in her hand,