s uniformly grand. Character
and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient
to grandeur. The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him
indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the
patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity;
his women are moulds of generation, his infants teem with man; his men
are a race of giants. This is the 'terribile via' hinted at by Agostino
Caracci; though, perhaps, as little understood by the Bolognese as by
the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To give
the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty, was
the exclusive power of Michael Angelo. He is the inventor of epic in
painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel which exhibits
the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He
has personated motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied
sentiment on the monuments of St Lorenzo; unraveled the features of
meditation in the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine chapel; and in the
'Last Judgment,' with every attitude that varies the human body, traced
the master trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though, as
sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all
who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an
individual--Julio the Second only excepted; and in him he represented
the reigning passion rather than the man. In painting, he contented
himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected
all meretricious ornament. The fabric of St Peter's scattered into
infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he
concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex, gave the
air of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him for all in all, was
Michael Angelo, the salt of art; sometimes, no doubt, he had his moments
of dereliction, deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his
forms with futile and ostentatious anatomy; both met with armies of
copyists, and it has been his fate to have been censured for their
folly." This studied panegyric is nevertheless vigorous--emulous as that
of Longinus, of showing the author to be--

"Himself, the great sublime he draws."

It hurries away the mind of the reader till it kindles a congenial
enthusiasm, we have the more readily given the quotation, as it is not
an unfair specimen of Mr Fuseli's p