this paper, are
not artists, are not connected with artists. And yet, upon the general
principle of sympathy with native merit, and of disgust towards all
affectation, we cannot but recall such anecdotes with scorn; and often
we recollect the stories recorded by poor Benvenuto Cellini, that
dissolute but brilliant vagabond, who (like our own British artists)
was sometimes upbraided with the degeneracy of modern art, and, upon
his humbly requesting some evidence, received, by way of practical
answer, a sculptured gem or vase, perhaps with a scornful demand
of--when would he be able to produce anything like that--'eh, Master
Ben? Fancy we must wait a few centuries or so, before you'll be ready
with the fellow of this.' And, lo! on looking into some hidden angle
of the beautiful production, poor Cellini discovered his own private
mark, the supposed antique having been a pure forgery of his own. Such
cases remind one too forcibly of the pretty Horatian tale, where, in a
contest between two men who undertake to mimic a pig's grunting, he
who happens to be the favourite of the audience is applauded to the
echo for his felicitous execution, and repeatedly encored, whilst the
other man is hissed off the stage, and well kicked by a band of
amateurs and cognoscenti, as a poor miserable copyist and impostor;
but, unfortunately for the credit of his exploders, he has just time,
before they have quite kicked him off, for exposing to view the real
pig concealed under his cloak, which pig it was, and not himself, that
had been the artist--forced by pinches into 'mimicry' of his own
porcine music. Of all baffled connoisseurs, surely, these Roman
pig-fanciers must have looked the most confounded. Yet there is no
knowing: and we ourselves have a clever friend, but rather too given
to subtilising, who contends, upon some argument not perfectly
intelligible to us, that Horace was not so conclusive in his logic as
he fancied; that the real pig might not have an 'ideal' or normal
squeak, but a peculiar and non-representative squeak; and that, after
all, the man might deserve the 'threshing' he got. Well, it may be so;
but, however, the Roman audience, wrong or not, for once fancied
themselves in the wrong; and we cannot but regret that our own
ungenerous disparagers of native merit, and _exclusive_ eulogisers of
the dead or the alien--of those only '_quos Libitina sacravit_,' or
whom oceans divide from us--are not now and then open to the sam