es,
unless immediately of the profession.--And why so? No man protests, that
he cannot read poetry, he can make no pleasure out of Milton or
Shakespear, or shudder at the ingratitude of Lear's daughters on the
stage. Why then should people pretend insensibility, when divine
Guercino exerts his unrivalled powers of the pathetic in the fine
picture at Zampieri palace, of Hagar's dismission into the desert with
her son? While none else could have touched with such truth of
expression the countenances of each; leaving him most to be pitied,
perhaps, who issues the command against his will; accompanying it
however with innumerable benedictions, and alleviating its severity with
the softest tenderness.

He only among our poets could have planned such a picture, who penned
the Eloisa, and knew the agonies of a soul struggling against
unpermitted passions, and conquering from the noblest motives of faith
and of obedience.

Glorious exertion of excellence! This is the first time my heart has
been made really alive to the powers of this magical art. Candid
Italians! let me again exclaim; they shewed us a Vandyke in the same
palace, surrounded by the works of their own incomparable countrymen;
and _there_ say they, "_Quasi quasi si puo circondarla_[Footnote: You
may almost run round her.]." You may almost run round it, was the
expression. The picture was a very fine one; a single figure of the
Madona, highly painted, and happily placed among those who knew, because
they possessed his perfections who drew it. Were Homer alive, and
acquainted with our language, he would admire that Shakespear whom
Voltaire condemns. Twice in this town has Guido shewed those powers
which critics have denied him: the power of grouping his figures with
propriety, and distributing his light and shadow to advantage: as he
has shewn it _but twice_, however, it is certain the connoisseurs are
not very wrong, and even in those very performances one may read their
justification: for Job, though surrounded by a crowd of people, has a
strangely insulated look, and the sweet sufferer on the fore-ground of
his Herodian cruelty seems wholly uninterested in the general distress,
and occupies herself and every spectator completely and solely with her
own particular grief.

The boasted Raphael here does not in my eyes triumph over the wonders of
this Caracci school. At Rome, I am told, his superiority is more
visible. _Nous verrons_[Footnote: We shall see.].