"That you may distinctly perceive and invariably distinguish what we mean by appropriate character in art, particularly in sculpture, I would class with these sculptures, the Hercules, the Apollo, the Venus, the Laocoon, and the Gladiator. In these examples you will find what is appropriate in character to subject, united with correctness of outline; and it is this combination of truths which has arrested the attention of an admiring world, ever since they were produced; and which will attract to them the admiration of after ages, so long as the workings of the mind on the external form can be contemplated and understood. "Now let us see what works there are since the revival of art in the modern world, which rest on the same basis of appropriate character and correctness of outline, with those of the ancient Greeks. "The Moses which the powers of Michael Angelo's mind has presented to our view, claims our first attention. In this statue the points of character, in every mode of precise, determinate, and elevated expression, have been carried to a pitch of grandeur which modern art has not since excelled. In this figure of Moses, Michael Angelo has fixed the unalterable standard of the Jewish lawgiver,--a character delineated and justified by the text in inspired sculpture. The character of Moses was well suited to the grandeur of the artist's conceptions, and to the dreadful energy of his feelings. Accordingly, in mental character, this figure holds the first station in modern art; and I believe we may venture to say, had no competitor in ancient, except those of the Jupiter and Minerva by Phidias. But the Saviour, all meekness and benevolence, which Michael Angelo made to accompany the Moses, was not in unison with his genius. The figure is mean, but slightly removed from an academical figure, and in no point appropriate to the subject: so are most of the single figures of the artist, in his great work on the Day of Judgment; but his groups in that composition are every where in character, and have not their rivals either in painting or sculpture. His Bacchus claims our admiration, as being appropriate to the subject, by the same excellence in delineation which distinguish the groups in the Day of Judgment. No person can have a higher veneration than I have for that grandeur of character impressed on the figures by Michael Angelo; but it is the fitness of the characters and of the action to the subject, to which I wish to draw your attention, and not to pour out praise on those points, in which he and other eminent masters are deficient. On this occasion, I must therefore be permitted to repeat, that most of the single figures in his great work of the Day of Judgment, are deficient in the fitness of appropriate character, and in the fitness of appropriate action to the subject; although as single figures they demand our admiration. But excellent as they are, they are but the ingenious adaptation of legs, arms, and heads, to the celebrated