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of contemporary excellence against that of elder time, must have almost
every class of men arrayed against him. The generous, because they would
not find matter of accusation against established dignities; the
envious, because they like not the sound of a living man's praise; the
wise, because they prefer the opinion of centuries to that of days; and
the foolish, because they are incapable of forming an opinion of their
own. Obloquy so universal is not lightly to be risked, and the few who
make an effort to stem the torrent, as it is made commonly in favor of
their own works, deserve the contempt which is their only reward. Nor is
this to be regretted, in its influence on the progress and preservation
of things technical and communicable. Respect for the ancients is the
salvation of art, though it sometimes blinds us to its _ends_. It
increases the power of the painter, though it diminishes his liberty;
and if it be sometimes an incumbrance to the essays of invention, it is
oftener a protection from the consequences of audacity. The whole system
and discipline of art, the collected results of the experience of ages,
might, but for the fixed authority of antiquity, be swept away by the
rage of fashion, or lost in the glare of novelty; and the knowledge
which it had taken centuries to accumulate, the principles which mighty
minds had arrived at only in dying, might be overthrown by the frenzy of
a faction, and abandoned in the insolence of an hour.

Neither, in its general application, is the persuasion of the
superiority of former works less just than useful. The greater number
of them are, and must be, immeasurably nobler than any of the results of
present effort, because that which is best of the productions of four
thousand years must necessarily be in its accumulation, beyond all
rivalry from the works of any given generation; but it should always be
remembered that it is improbable that many, and impossible that all, of
such works, though the greatest yet produced, should approach abstract
perfection; that there is certainly something left for us to carry
farther, or complete; that any given generation has just the same chance
of producing some individual mind of first-rate calibre, as any of its
predecessors; and that if such a mind _should_ arise, the chances are,
that with the assistance of experience and example, it would, in its
particular and chosen path, do greater things than had been before done.

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