207. Modesty.--The touchstone of genuine modesty is the attention paid to criticism, and the temper with which it is received, or its advice adopted; the most arrogant pretence, the most fiery ambition, the most towering conceit, may fence themselves with smoothness, silence and submissive looks--Oil, the smoothest of substances, swims on all. 208. Praise.--Despise all praise but what he gives who has been praised for similar efforts; or his whose interest it is to blame. 209. Emulation.--The vindication of the innate powers, of the individual dignity of man, careless of appendages and accidental advantage, grasps the substance of its object. 210. Envy, the bantling of desperate self-love, grasps the appendages, heedless of things. Emulation embalms the dead; Envy the vampire, blasts the living. 211. Flattery, the midwife of half-born conceits and struggling wishes, sometimes persuades, a boy that he is a man, a dwarf that he is a giant, but too often enervates the limbs of energy. 212. Vanity.--The vain is the most humble of mortals: the victim of a pimple. 213. Those reduced to live on the alms of genius, are the first to deny its existence. 214. Shakspeare is to Sophocles what the incessant flashes of a tempestuous night are to daylight. 215. Things came to Raffaelle and Shakspeare; Michael Angelo and Milton came to things. 216. The women of Michael Angelo are the sex. _Coroll._--Eve emerging from the side of Adam; Eve reclining under the tree of knowledge, in the Capella Sistina; the figures of Night and Dawn on the tombs of the Medici, are pure generic forms, little discriminated by character, and more expressive by action than emotion of features; solidity without heaviness separates them from the females in the Last Judgment, which, with the exception of the Madonna and St. Catharine, are less beholden to grace than anatomy. The Cartoon of the Leda proves that he was not inattentive to the detail of female charms, but beauty did not often visit his slumbers, guide his hand, or interrupt the gravity of his meditation. 217. The women of Raffaelle are either his own mistress, or mothers. _Coroll._--This relates chiefly to his Madonnas--Of his saints the St. Cecilia at Bologna has most of antique beauty, and, whether imitated or conceived, resembles the Niobe; but pride is absorbed in devotion, she is the enraptured victim of divine love, and glows with celestial fire: the goddesses of the Farnesina, however gracefully imagined, are too ponderous for aërial forms and amorous conceits. 218. The women of Correggio are seraglio beauties. _Coroll._--The enchantment of the Magdalen, in the picture of the St. Jerome in the Pilotta at Parma, is produced by chiaroscuro and attitude. Sensuality personified is the general character of his females, and the grace of his children, less naiveté than grimace, the caricature of jollity. 219. The women of Titiano are the plump, fair, marrowy Venetian race.