Lorrain were exceptions to this latter course of procedure. Poussin did not go to Italy until he was thirty years of age, up to which time he had learned no good under the masters that he had in France; but he had filled his mind with studies made privately through the impulse of his own taste, from casts and engravings of the works of Raphael and Julio Romano. When he reached Italy, he applied himself anew to the principles of the art. At first he studied Titian; and accordingly his pictures of that period, that is, his earliest, are much better coloured than his subsequent works. For, afterwards, carried away by the expressions of Domenichino, whose school he frequented, and by the antique statues, he neglected colouring, fearing that he should not be able to do justice to it at the same time with these other parts of the art, of which he had become so enthusiastic, that one might tell from his works every statue that has served him for a model. By such injudicious conduct, he became as bad a colourist as he was a great and learned designer. I need go no farther than the Louvre for sufficient proofs in support of my opinion, to say nothing of other exceptions that may be made to his figures, which have too much feeling of the marble, too great an uniformity in the airs of the head and in the expressions, and too little contrast in their positions, while the folds of the draperies are too numerous.

Claude Lorrain, again, attained the high pitch of fame to which he has risen, by pursuing a course

altogether opposed to that of Poussin; for, thanks to his happy stars, finding no employment at Rome as a confectioner, in which capacity he had arrived there, he entered the service of Augustino Tassi, a good landscape painter of that time. Here, opportunity, and his natural taste, led him to try his pencil in that line, and his genius taught him to adopt nature for his only guide, who repaid him well for the wisdom of his choice; for to that we owe those marvellous works to which the greatest connoisseurs continue to render the just tribute of their admiration. His performances give a very high idea of his powers, yet in some of them he seems to have worked from habit, and without consulting nature, and these may be blamed for an intolerable degree of blackness; nor are they faultless in the aërial perspective and the local colours of distant objects, nor in the clouds, which are sometimes woolly to a ridiculous degree. The Gallery of the Louvre furnishes plenty of examples of these different defects.

The last and most important point which has occurred to me during my observations in regard to the decline of painting is, that the good colouring found amongst the ancients may itself have been the innocent cause of its loss. For having become so common a quality among painters, they may have thought that they could no longer be distinguished by it from the crowd; and while seeking, in consequence, some other means of being so, they have come by degrees to neglect colouring in pro

portion as they have directed their attention to the other qualities upon which they hope to found new claims to notice. Thus situate, it was natural that the eminent merit of Raphael, and of his followers, in design and its parts, should determine their choice towards these, and that the honours and rewards which popes, cardinals, and all the great, had heaped upon this wonderful man, so worthy of being entitled the Prince of Designers, should have increased the attraction.

The resolution, once taken, of distinguishing themselves from the crowd by following the same road which had conducted Raphael to the highest pinnacle of fame, all their views have been necessarily turned towards design, the airs of the heads, the expressions and attitudes, and their attention has been in an equal degree diverted from colouring and its parts. Example, always contagious, has drawn after it the greater number of artists; until finally, by running after Raphael, whose eminent qualities they have never been able to reach, they have ended by losing even the colouring to which they had attained, and the loss of that has completed the fall of the art.

You, O Rome, and your antiques, are, in my eyes, the cause of this fall, so little honourable to modern art! You alone enable me to solve a problem which has long been the wonder and the regret of all Europe! You alone present to me the true reading of this strange enigma! The antique and design! design and the antique!

These are all that are seen, heard of, and commended, all that is taught and learned in you! In you, every one, small or great, ignorant or learned, talks of them, and busies himself about them from morning till night; nor can the young artist escape being smitten with the enthusiasm for them with which your whole people are inflated. Can we, then, be astonished, that those who have sojourned for a time within your walls should return with heads stuffed only with design and the antique, your dangerous counsels having sealed their eyes to the value of all the other parts of painting?

CHAPTER XI.

OF THE DIFFERENT MANNERS OF THE MASTERS.

THE word manner has two significations very dif ferent from each other. In one sense it means a peculiarity of habit, and implies a reproach against the painter. In the other, it affords the means of knowing the author of a work, and the school to which it belongs. In this last sense the manner of a master is nothing but his particular way of choosing, imagining, and representing the subject of his pictures. It includes what are called his style and handling; that is, the ideal part, and the mechanical part, which give their character to his works in the eyes of those who have bestowed upon them sufficient attention to become familiar with them; just as the choice of the matter, the fashion of the language, the turn of the phrases, and even the orthography and the formation of the letters, give such a peculiarity of character to a writer, that, if any production of his, in his own handwriting, although unsigned, should fall into the hands of one who had seen many others of his performances, the author would stand disclosed to such a person at once, without the necessity of having him named. The mechanical part especially becomes in painting, just as in writing, the most cer