e of imitating this great man. Buffon hung the
portrait of Newton before his writing-table.

On this subject, Tacitus sublimely expresses himself at the close of his
admired biography of Agricola: "I do not mean to censure the custom of
preserving in brass or marble the shape and stature of eminent men; but
busts and statues, like their originals, are frail and perishable. The
soul is formed of finer elements, its inward form is not to be expressed
by the hand of an artist with unconscious matter; our manners and our
morals may in some degree trace the resemblance. All of Agricola that
gained our love and raised our admiration still subsists, and ever will
subsist, preserved in the minds of men, the register of ages and the
records of fame."

What is more agreeable to the curiosity of the mind and the eye than the
portraits of great characters? An old philosopher, whom Marville invited
to see a collection of landscapes by a celebrated artist, replied,
"Landscapes I prefer seeing in the country itself, but I am fond of
contemplating the pictures of illustrious men." This opinion has some
truth; Lord Orford preferred an interesting portrait to either landscape
or historical painting. "A landscape, however excellent in its
distributions of wood, and water, and buildings, leaves not one trace in
the memory; historical painting is perpetually false in a variety of
ways, in the costume, the grouping, the portraits, and is nothing more
than fabulous painting; but a real portrait is truth itself, and calls
up so many collateral ideas as to fill an intelligent mind more than any
other species."

Marville justly reprehends the fastidious feelings of those ingenious
men who have resisted the solicitations of the artist, to sit for their
portraits. In them it is sometimes as much pride as it is vanity in
those who are less difficult in this respect. Of Gray, Fielding, and
Akenside, we have no heads for which they sat; a circumstance regretted
by their admirers, and by physiognomists.

To an arranged collection of PORTRAITS, we owe several interesting
works. Granger's justly esteemed volumes originated in such a
collection. Perrault's _Eloges_ of "the illustrious men of the
seventeenth century" were drawn up to accompany the engraved portraits
of the most celebrated characters of the age, which a fervent love of
the fine arts and literature had had engraved as an elegant tribute to
the fame of those great men. They are confined