volume of Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, including
observations also on the relations of those arts to Music. Lessing is
known to have made use of this work in his _Laocoeon_, and Diderot gave
it a place among the books which he recommended in his Plan of a
University.[20] This, as it is the earliest, seems to have been the best
contribution to aesthetic thought before Lessing and Diderot. Daniel
Webb, the English friend of Raphael Mengs, published an Enquiry into the
Beauties of Painting (1760), and Diderot wrote a notice of it,[21] but
it appears to have made no mark on his mind. Andre, a Jesuit father,
wrote an Essay on the Beautiful (1741), which distributed the kinds of
art with precision, but omitted to say in what the Beautiful consists.
The abbe Batteux wrote a volume reducing the fine arts to a single
principle, and another volume attempting a systematic classification of
them. The first of these was the occasion of Diderot's Letter on Deaf
Mutes, and Diderot described their author as a good man of letters, but
without taste, without criticism, and without philosophy; _a ces
bagatelles pres, le plus joli garcon du monde_.[22]

[19] _E.g._ Watelet's poem, _Sur l'Art de Peindre_, 1760; Le
Mierre's _Sur la Peinture_, 1769; Marsy's _Pictura Carmen_, 1736.
See Diderot's works, xiii. 17, etc.

[20] _Oeuv._, iii. 486. Guhrauer, ii. 15. Also Bluemner's admirable
edition of the _Laocoeon_, p. 173.

[21] xiii. 33.

[22] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, iv. 136. In another place in the same work
either Grimm or Diderot makes a remark about Batteux, which is worth
remembering in our own age of official vindications of orthodoxy.
The abbe had written a book about first causes. "I venture to
observe moreover to M. l'abbe Batteux that when in this world a man
has put on the dress of any sort of harlequin, red or black, with a
pair of bands or a frill, he ought to give up once for all every
kind of philosophic discussion, because it is impossible for him to
speak according to his faith and his conscience; and a writer of bad
faith is all the more odious, as nothing compelled him to break
silence." _Ib._ vi. 120.

Travellers to the land where criticism of art has been so slight, and
where production has been so noble, so bounteous, so superb, published
the story of what Italy had shown to them. Madame de Pompadour designed
to make her brother the Super