ornaments."
He finishes this admirable discourse with the following eloquent
passage:--"It is allowed on all hands, that facts and events, however
they may bind the historian, have no dominion over the poet or the
painter. With us history is made to bend and conform to this great idea
of art. And why? Because these arts, in their highest province, are not
addressed to the gross senses; but to the desires of the mind, to that
spark of divinity which we have within, impatient of being circumscribed
and pent up by the world which is about us. Just so much as our art has
of this, just so much of dignity, I had almost said of divinity, it
exhibits; and those of our artists who possessed this mark of
distinction in the highest degree, acquired from thence the glorious
appellation of divine.

[11] The reader will remember the supposed epitaph,
"Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee."

Mr Burnet's notes to this Discourse are not important to art. There is
an amusing one on acting, that discusses the question of naturalness on
the stage, and with some pleasant anecdotes.

* * * * *

The FOURTEENTH DISCOURSE is chiefly occupied with the character of
Gainsborough, and landscape painting. It has brought about him, and his
name, a hornet's nest of critics, in consequence of some remarks upon a
picture of Wilson's. Gainsborough and Sir Joshua, and perhaps in some
degree Wilson, had been rivals. It has been said that Wilson and
Gainsborough never liked each other. It is a well-known anecdote that
Sir Joshua, at a dinner, gave the health of Gainsborough, adding "the
greatest landscape painter of the age," to which Wilson, at whom the
words were supposed to be aimed, dryly added, "and the greatest portrait
painter too." We can, especially under circumstances, for there had been
a coolness between the President and Gainsborough, pardon the too
favourable view taken of Gainsborough's landscape pictures. He was
unquestionably much greater as a portrait painter. The following account
of the interview with Gainsborough upon his death-bed, is touching, and
speaks well of both:--"A few days before he died he wrote me a letter,
to express his acknowledgments for the good opinion I entertained of his
abilities, and the manner in which (he had been informed) I always spoke
of him; and desired that he might see me once before he died. I am aware
how flatte