41. Beauty, whether individual or ideal, consists in the concurrence of parts to one end, or the union of the simple and the various. _Coroll._--Whatever be your powers, assume not to legislate on beauty: though always the same herself, her empire is despotic, and subject to the anarchies of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow: in treating subjects of universal claim, most has been done by leaving most to the reader's and spectator's taste or fancy. "It is difficult," says Horace, "to pronounce exactly to every man's eye and mind, what every man thinks himself entitled to estimate by a standard of his own."[6] The Apollo and Medicean Venus are not by all received as the canons of male and female beauty; and Homer's Helen is the finest woman we have read of, merely because he has left her to be made up of the Dulcineas of his readers. 42. Beauty alone, fades to insipidity; and like possession cloys. 43. Grace is beauty in motion, or rather grace regulates the air, the attitudes and movements of beauty. 44. Nature makes no parade of her means--hence all studied grace is unnatural. _Coroll._--The attitudes of Parmegiano are exhibitions of studied grace. The grace of Guido is become proverbial, but it is the grace of the art. 45. All actions and attitudes of children are graceful, because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment--divested of affectation, and free from all pretence. _Coroll._--The attitudes and motions of the figures of Rafaelle are graceful because they are poised by Nature. 46. Proportion, or symmetry, is the basis of beauty; propriety, of grace. 47. Creation gives, invention finds existence. 48. Invention in general is the combination of the possible, the probable, or the known, in a mode that strikes with novelty. _Coroll._--Invention has been said to mean no more than the moment of any fact chosen by the artist. To say that the painter's invention is not to find or to combine its own subject, is to confine it to the poet's or historian's alms--is to annihilate its essence; it says in other words, that Macbeth or Ugolino would be no subjects for the pencil, if they had not been prepared by history and borrowed from Shakspeare and Dante. 49. Ask not--Where is fancy bred? in the heart? in the head? how begot? how nourished? _Coroll._--The critic who inquires whether in the madness of Lear, grief for the loss of empire, or the resentment of filial ingratitude preponderated--and he who doubts whether it be within the limits of art to embody beings of fancy, agitate different questions, but of equal futility. 50. Genius may adopt, but never steals. _Coroll._--An adopted idea or figure in the works of genius will be a foil or a companion; but an idea of genius borrowed by mediocrity scorns the base alliance and crushes all its mean associates--it is the Cyclop's thumb, by which the pigmy measured his own littleness,--"or hangs like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief."