Mr Fuseli proceeds to eulogize Aristides; whom
history records as, in a peculiar excellence, the painter of the
passions of nature. "Such, history informs us, was the suppliant whose
voice you seemed to hear, such his sick man's half-extinguished eye and
labouring breast, such Byblis expiring in the pangs of love, and, above
all, the half-slain mother shuddering lest the eager babe should suck
the blood from her palsied nipple."--"Timanthes had marked the limits
that discriminate terror from the excess of horror; Aristides drew the
line that separates it from disgust." Then follows a very just criticism
upon instances in which he considered that Raffaelle himself and Nicolo
Poussin had overstepped the bounds of propriety, and averted the
feelings from their object, by ideas of disgust. In the group of
Raffaelle, a man is removing the child from the breast of the mother
with one hand, while the other is applied to his nostrils. Poussin, in
his plague of the Philistines, has copied the loathsome action--so,
likewise, in another picture, said to be the plague of Athens, but
without much reason so named, in the collection of J. P. Mills, Esq. Dr
Waagen, in his admiration for the executive part of art, speaks of it as
"a very rich masterpiece of Poussin, in which we are reconciled by his
skill to the horrors of the subject."

In the commencement of the lecture, there are offered some definitions
of the terms of art, "nature, grace, taste, copy, imitation, genius,
talent." In that of nature, he seems entirely to agree with Reynolds;
that of beauty leaves us pretty much in the dark in our search for it,
"as that harmonious whole of the human frame, that unison of parts to
one end, which enchants us. The result of the standard set by the great
masters of our art, the ancients, and confirmed by the submissive
verdict of modern imitation." This is unphilosophical, unsatisfactory;
nor is that of grace less so--"that artless balance of motion and
repose, sprung from character, founded on propriety, which neither falls
short of the demands, nor overleaps the modesty of nature. Applied to
execution it means that dexterous power which hides the means by which
it was attained, the difficulties it has conquered." We humbly suggest,
that both parts of this definition may be found where there is little
grace. It is evident that the lecturer did not subscribe to any theory
of lines, as _per se_ beautiful or graceful, and altogether disregar