This remark, I must acknowledge, is not so proper for the colouring, as the design; but it will hold for both. As the words, &c. are evidently shown to be the cloathing of the thought, in the same sense as colours are the cloathing of the design, so the painter and the poet ought to judge exactly, when the colouring and expressions are perfect, and then to think their work is truly finished. Apelles said of Protogenes,—that he knew not when to give over. A work may be over-wrought, as well as under-wrought; too much labour often takes away the spirit by adding to the polishing, so that there remains nothing but a dull correctness, a piece without any considerable faults, but with few beauties; for when the spirits are drawn off, there is nothing but a _caput mortuum_. Statius never thought an expression could be bold enough; and if a bolder could be found, he rejected the first. Virgil had judgment enough to know daring was necessary; but he knew the difference betwixt a glowing colour and a glaring. As, when he compared the shocking of the fleets at Actium to the jostling of islands rent from their foundations, and meeting in the ocean, he knew the comparison was forced beyond nature, and raised too high; he therefore softens the metaphor with a _credas_: “you would _almost believe_—that mountains or islands rushed against each other:” _——pelago credas innare revulsas_ _Cycladas, aut montes concurrere montibus altos._ But here I must break off without finishing the discourse. _Cynthius aurem vellit, et admonuit_, &c. The things which are behind are of too nice a consideration for an essay, begun and ended in twelve mornings; and perhaps the judges of painting and poetry, when I tell them how short a time it cost me, may make me the same answer which my late Lord Rochester made to one, who, to commend a tragedy, said it was written in three weeks: “How the devil could he be so long about it?” For that poem was infamously bad; and I doubt this Parallel is little better; and then the shortness of the time is so far from being a commendation, that it is scarcely an excuse. But if I have really drawn a portrait to the knees, or an half-length, with a tolerable likeness, then I may plead, with some justice, for myself, that the rest is left to the imagination. Let some better artist provide himself of a deeper canvas, and, taking these hints which I have given, set the figure on its legs, and finish it in the invention, design, and colouring. THE PREFACE OF MONSIEUR DE PILES, THE FRENCH TRANSLATOR.