[*†37.] The principal and most important part of painting, is to find out, and thoroughly to understand, what nature has made most beautiful, and most proper to this art; [*†39.] and that a choice of it may be made according to the taste and manner of the {40.} ancients; [*†40.] without which, all is nothing but a blind and rash barbarity; which rejects what is most beautiful, and seems, with an audacious insolence, to despise an art, of which it is wholly ignorant; which has occasioned these words of the ancients: “That no man is so bold, so rash, and so overweening of his own works, as an ill painter, and a bad poet, who are not conscious to themselves of their own ignorance.” [*†45.] We love what we understand; we desire what {45.} we love; we pursue the enjoyment of those things which we desire; and arrive at last to the possession of what we have pursued, if we warmly persist in our design. In the mean time, we ought not to expect, that blind fortune should infallibly throw into our hands those beauties; for though we may light by chance on some which are true and natural, yet they may prove either not to be decent, or not to be ornamental. Because it is not sufficient to imitate nature in every circumstance, {50.} dully, and as it were literally, and minutely; but it becomes a painter to take what is most beautiful, [*†50.] as being the sovereign judge of his own art; “what is less beautiful, or is faulty, he shall freely correct by the dint of his own genius,” [*†52.] and permit no transient beauties to escape his observation. [Sidenote: II. Of theory and practice.]