no pleasure in the exercise of their art as such: it is all to astonish or to get money that they follow it; or if they are thrown out of it, they regret it only as a bankrupt does a business which was a livelihood to him. Barry did not live, like Titian, in the taste of colours; they were not a _pabulum_ to his sense; he did not hold green, blue, red, and yellow as the precious darlings of his eye. They did not therefore sink into his mind, or nourish and enrich it with the sense of beauty, though he knew enough of them to furnish hints and topics of discourse. If he had had the most beautiful object in nature before him in his painting-room in the Adelphi, he would have neglected it, after a moment's burst of admiration, to talk of his last composition, or to scrawl some new and vast design. Art was nothing to him, or if anything, merely a stalking-horse to his ambition and display of intellectual power in general; and therefore he neglected it to daub huge allegories, or cabal with the Academy, where the violence of his will or the extent of his views found ample scope. As a painter he was valuable merely as a draughtsman, in that part of the art which may be reduced to lines and precepts, or positive measurement. There is neither colour, nor expression, nor delicacy, nor beauty, in his works. 1827. ESSAY IX MATTER AND MANNER Nothing can frequently be more striking than the difference of style or manner, where the _matter_ remains the same, as in paraphrases and translations. The most remarkable example which occurs to us is in the beginning of the _Flower and Leaf_, by Chaucer, and in the modernisation of the same passage by Dryden. We shall give an extract from both, that the reader may judge for himself. The original runs thus: 'And I that all this pleasaunt sight _ay_ sie, Thought sodainly I felt_e_ so sweet an aire _Con_ of the eglentere, that certainely There is no heart, I deme, in such dispaire, Ne with _no_ thought_e_s froward and contraire So overlaid, but it should_e_ soone have bote, If it had ones felt this savour sote. And as I stood and cast aside mine eie, I was of ware the fairest medler tree, That ever yet in all my life I sie, As full of blossomes as it might_e_ be; Therein a goldfinch leaping pretil_e_ Fro bough to bough; and, as him list, _gan_ eete Of bud_de_s here and there and floures sweet_e_. And to the herber side _ther_ was joyning_e_ This faire tree, of which I have you told; And at the last the brid began to sing_e_, When he had eaten what he eat_e_ wold_e_, So passing sweetly, that by manifold_e_, It was more pleasaunt than I coud_e_ devise. And when his song was ended in this wise,