applied to its appropriate object. But when we compare his portraits, or imaginary pieces in oil, with those of Titian, Velasquez, or Vandyke, the inferiority is manifest. It is not in the design but the finishing; not in the conception but the execution. The colours are frequently raw and harsh; the details or distant parts of the piece ill-finished or neglected. The bold neglect of Michael Angelo is very apparent. Raphael, with less original genius than his immortal master, had more taste and much greater delicacy of pencil; his conceptions, less extensive and varied, are more perfect; his finishing is always exquisite. Unity of emotion was his great object in design; equal delicacy of finishing in execution. Thence he has attained by universal consent the highest place in painting.

"Nothing," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is denied to well-directed labour; nothing is to be attained without it." "Excellence in any department," says Johnson, "can now be attained only by the labour of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." These words should ever be present to the minds of all who aspire to rival the great of former days; who feel in their bosoms a spark of the spirit which led Homer, Dante, and Michael Angelo to immortality. In a luxurious age, comfort or station is deemed the chief good of life; in a commercial community, money becomes the universal object of ambition. Thence our acknowledged deficiency in the fine arts; thence our growing weakness in the higher branches of literature. Talent looks for its reward too soon. Genius seeks an immediate recompense; long protracted exertions are never attempted; great things are not done, because great efforts are not made.

None will work now without the prospect of an immediate return. Very possibly it is so; but then let us not hope or wish for immortality. "Present time and future," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "are rivals; he who solicits the one must expect to be discountenanced by the other." It is not that we want genius; what we want is the great and heroic spirit which will devote itself; by strenuous efforts, to great things, without seeking any reward but their accomplishment.

Nor let it be said that great subjects for the painter's pencil, the poet's muse, are not to be found—that they are exhausted by former efforts, and nothing remains to us but imitation. Nature is inexhaustible; the events of men are unceasing, their variety is endless. Philosophers were mourning the monotony of time, historians were deploring the sameness of events, in the years preceding the French Revolution—on the eve of the Reign of Terror, the flames of Moscow, the retreat from Russia. What was the strife around Troy to the battle of Leipsic?—the contests of Florence and Pisa to the revolutionary war? What ancient naval victory to that of Trafalgar? Rely upon it, subjects for genius are not wanting; genius itself, steadily and perseveringly directed, is the thing required. But genius and energy alone are not sufficient; COURAGE and disinterestedness are needed more than all. Courage to withstand the assaults of envy, to despise the ridicule of mediocrity—disinterestedness to trample under foot the seductions of ease, and disregard the attractions of opulence. An heroic mind is more wanted in the library or the studio, than in the field. It is wealth and cowardice which extinguish the light of genius, and dig the grave of literature as of nations.