the influence of his works on public principle: with the decline of Religion and Liberty his importance and the Art declined; and though the Egyptian custom of embalming the dead and suffering the living to linger had not yet been adopted, from the organ of the public he became the tool of private patronage; and private patronage, however commendable or liberal, can no more supply the want of general encouragement, than the conservatories and hotbeds of the rich, the want of a fertile soil or genial climate. Luxury in times of taste keeps up execution in proportion as it saps the dignity and moral principle of the Art; gold is the motive of its exertions, and nothing that ennobles man was ever produced by gold. When Nero transported the Pontic Apollo to the golden house, and furnished the colossal shoulders of the god with his own head, Sculpture lent her hand to legitimate the sacrilege: why should Painting be supposed to have been more squeamish when applied to decorate the apartments of his pleasures and the cabinet of Poppæa with Milesian pollutions, or the attitudes of Elephantis? The effect of honours and rewards has been insisted on as a necessary incentive to artists: they ought indeed to be, they sometimes are, the result of superior powers; but accidental or partial honours cannot create Genius, nor private profusion supply public neglect. No genuine work of Art ever was or ever can be produced, but for its own sake; if the artist do not conceive to please himself, he never will finish to please the world. Can we persuade ourselves that all the treasures of the globe could suddenly produce an Iliad or Paradise Lost, or the Jupiter of Phidias, or the Capella Sistina? Circumstances may assist or retard parts, but cannot make them: they are the winds that now blow out a light, now animate a spark to conflagration. Nature herself has set her barriers between age and age, between genius and genius, which no mortal overleaps; all attempts to raise to perfection at once, what can only be reared by a succession of epochs, must prove abhortive and nugatory: the very proposals of premiums, honours, and rewards to excite talent or rouse genius, prove of themselves that the age is unfavourable to Art; for, had it the patronage of the public, how could it want them?