After leaving the Reynolds Gallery, where, upon the whole, I received a good deal of pleasure, not feeling that I had quite had my fill of paintings, I stumbled upon a picture in Piccadilly (No. 22, I think), which purports to be a portrait of Francis the First by Leonardo da Vinci. Heavens, what a difference! It is but a portrait as most of those I had been seeing; but placed by them it would kill them, swallow them up as Moses's rod the other rods. Where did those old painters get their models? I see no such figures, not in my dreams, as this Francis, in the character, or rather with the attributes of John the Baptist. A more than mortal majesty in the brow and upon the eyelid--an arm muscular, beautifully formed--the long graceful massy fingers compressing, yet so as not to hurt, a lamb more lovely, more sweetly shrinking, than we can conceive that milk-white one which followed Una. The picture altogether looking as if it were eternal--combining the truth of flesh with a promise of permanence like marble. Leonardo, from the one or two specimens we have of him in England, must have been a stupendous genius. I scarce can think he has had his full fame--he who could paint that wonderful personification of the Logos or third person of the Trinity, grasping a globe, late in the possession of Mr. Troward of Pall-Mall, where the hand was by the boldest licence twice as big as the truth of drawing warranted, yet the effect to every one that saw it, by some magic of genius, was confessed to be not _monstrous_, but _miraculous_ and _silencing_. It could not be gainsaid. II.--[THE NEW ACTING] (1813)