51. Genius, inspired by invention, rends the veil that separates existence from possibility; peeps into the dark, and catches a shape, a feature, or a colour, in the reflected ray. 52. Talent, though panting, pursues genius through the plains of invention, but stops short at the brink that separates the real from the possible. Virgil followed Homer in making Mezentius speak to Rhœbus, but shrank from the reply of the prophetic courser.[7] 53. Whenever the medium of any work, whether lines, colour, grouping, diction, becomes so predominant as to absorb the subject in its splendour, the work is degraded to an inferior order. 54. The painter, who makes an historical figure address the spectator from the canvass, and the actor who addresses a soliloquy to you from the stage, have equal claims to your contempt or pity. 55. Common-place figures are as inadmissible in the grand style of painting as common-place characters or sentiments in poetry. _Coroll._--Common-place figures were first introduced by the gorgeous machinists of Venice, and adopted by the Bolognese school of Eclectics; the modern school of Rome from Carlo Maratta to Battoni knew nothing else; and they have been since indiscriminately disseminated on this side of the Alps, by those whom mediocrity obliged to hide themselves in crowds, or a knack at grouping stimulated to aggregate a rabble. 56. The copious is seldom grand. 57. Glitter is the refuge of the mean. 58. All apparatus destroys terror, as all ornament grandeur: the minute catalogue of the cauldron's ingredients in Macbeth destroys the terror attendant on mysterious darkness; and the seraglio-trappings of Rubens annihilate his heroes. 59. All conceits, not founded upon probable combinations of nature, are absurd. The _capricci_ of Salvator Rosa, and of his imitators, are, to the fiends of Michael Angelo, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the sallies of vigorous fancy. 60. Distinguish carefully between bold fancy and a daring hand; between the powers of nature and the acquisitions of practice: most of Salvator's banditti are a medley made up of starveling models and the shreds of his lumber-room brushed into notice by a daring pencil. 61. Distinguish between boldness and brutality of hand, between the face of beauty and _the bark of a tree_. 62. All mediocrity pretends. 63. Invention, strictly speaking, being confined to _one_ moment, he invents best who in that moment combines the traces of the past, the energy of the present, and a glimpse of the future. 64. Composition has been divided into natural and ornamental: that is dictated by the subject, this by effect or situation. 65. Distinguish between composition and grouping: though none can compose without grouping, most group without composing.