_Coroll._--Grandeur of style and execution do not exclusively depend upon dimensions: but in an age and amidst a race who have erected littleness or rather diminutiveness of size to the only credentials of admissibility into collections, to the passports without which Raffaelle himself finds it difficult to penetrate the sanctuaries of pigmy art, that which ennobled the age of Pericles, of Julio, and Leone, must be content to look to posterity for its reward. If it were physiognomically true, that the structure of every human face bears some analogy to that of some brute, it might reasonably surprise, that an individual marked by nature with no very remote resemblance to a Hippopotamus, should be considered as the legislator of a taste equally noted for tameness of conception and effeminate finish; but as it is improbable that one individual, however favoured by circumstances or endowed with all-persevering activity, or arrogance, could stamp the taste of a nation exclusively with his own, it may be fairly surmised that he did no more than find and rear the seeds of that Micromania which infects the public taste. 239. The medium of poetry is time and action; that of the plastic arts, space and figure. Poetry then is at its summit, when its hand arrests time and embodies action: and these, when they wing the marble or the canvass, and from the present moment dart rays back to the past and forward to the future. _Coroll._--Subjects are positive, negative, repulsive. The first are the proper materials, the voluntary servants of invention; to the second she gives interest and value; from the last she can escape only by the help of execution, for execution alone can palliate her defeat by the last. The Laocoon, the Hæmon and Antigone, the Niobe and her daughters, the death of Ananias, the Sacrifice at Lystra, Elymas struck blind, are positive subjects, speak their meaning with equal evidences to the scholar and the unlettered man, and excite the sympathy due to the calls of terror and pity with equal energy in every breast. St. Jerome presenting the translation of his Bible to the Infant Jesus, St. Peter at the feet of the Madonna receiving the thanksgivings of victorious Venice, with every other votive altar-piece, little interesting to humanity in general, owe the impression they make on us to the dexterous arrangement, the amorous or sublime enthusiasm of the artist;--but we lament to see invention waste its powers, and execution its skill, to excite our feelings for an action or event that receives its real interest from a motive which cannot be rendered intuitive; such as Alceste expiring, the legacy of Eudamidas, the cause of Demetrius's disorder. FOOTNOTES: [2] Tacit. Annal. lib. VI. "Nullam ob eximiam artem, sed quod par negotiis, neque supra erat." [3] D. Longin. περι ὑψους, § 34.