_Coroll._--The gentle spirit of Rafaelle embellished the conceits of Bembo and Divizio, to scatter incense round the triple mitre of his prince; and the Vatican became the flattering annals of the court of Julius and Leo: whilst Michael Angelo refused admittance to master and to times, and doomed his purple critic to hell.[4] 31. Distinguish between genius and singularity of character; an artist of mediocrity may be an odd man: let the nature of works be your guide. 32. The most impotent, the most vulgar, and the coldest artists generally arrogate to themselves the most vigorous, the most dignified, and the warmest subjects. 33. He has powers, dignity, and fire, who can inspire a trifle with importance. 34. Know that nothing is trifling in the hand of genius, and that importance itself becomes a bauble in that of mediocrity:--the shepherd's staff of Paris would have been an engine of death in the grasp of Achilles; the ash of Peleus could only have dropped from the effeminate fingers of the curled archer. 35. Art either imitates or copies, selects or transcribes; consults the class, or follows the individual. 36. Imitative art, is either epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned, historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes, the second moves, the third informs. 37. Whatever hides its limits in its greatness--whatever shows a feature of immensity, let the elements of Nature or the qualities of animated being make up its substance, is sublime. 38. Whatever by reflected self-love inspires us with hope, fear, pity, terror, love, or mirth--whatever makes events, and time, and place, the ministers of character and pathos, let fiction or reality compose its tissue, is dramatic. 39. That which tells us, not what might be, but what is; circumscribes the grand and the pathetic with truth of time, place, custom; what gives "a local habitation and a name," is historic. _Coroll._--No human performance is either purely epic, dramatic, or historic. Novelty and feelings will make the historian sometimes launch out into the marvellous; or will warm his bosom and extort a tear. The dramatist while gazing at some tremendous feature, or the pomp of superior agency, will drop the chain he holds, and be absorbed in the sublime; whilst the epic or lyric poet, forgetting his solitary grandeur, will sometimes descend and mix with his agents. The tragic and the comic dramatists formed themselves on Hector and Andromache, on Irus and Ulysses. The spirit from the prison-house breathes like the shade of Patroclus; Octavia and the daughter of Soranus[5] melt like Ophelia and Alcestis. 40. Those who have assigned to the plastic arts beauty, strictly so called, as the ultimate end of imitation, have circumscribed the whole by a part. _Coroll._--The charms of Helen and of Niobe are instruments of sublimity: Meleager and Cordelia fall victims to the passions; Agrippina and Berenice give interest to truth.