in every direction,--a flood of folly and
hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then perverted into
feeble sensualities, take the place of the representations of Christian
subjects, which had become blasphemous under the treatment of men like
the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity, nymphs
without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups upon
the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets with
preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused
intellect; the base school of landscape gradually usurps the place of
the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,--the
Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionary idealities of
Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps,
and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation
of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditch-water. And thus Christianity
and morality, courage, and intellect, and art all crumbling together
into one wreck, we are hurried on to the fall of Italy, the revolution
in France, and the condition of art in England (saved by her
Protestantism from severer penalty) in the time of George II.

"I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done any thing towards
diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting. But
the harm which has been done by Claude and the Poussins is as nothing
when compared to the mischief effected by Palladio, Scamozzi, and
Sansovino. Claude and the Poussins were weak men, and have had no
serious influence on the general mind. There is little harm in their
works being purchased at high prices: their real influence is very
slight, and they may be left without grave indignation to their poor
mission of furnishing drawing-rooms and assisting stranded conversation.
Not so the Renaissance architecture. Raised at once into all the
magnificence of which it was capable by Michael Angelo, then taken up by
men of real intellect and imagination, such as Scamozzi, Sansovino,
Inigo Jones, and Wren, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its
influence on the European mind; and that the more, because few persons
are concerned with painting, and, of those few, the larger number regard
it with slight attention; but all men are concerned with architecture,
and have at some time of their lives serious business with it. It does
not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds