ds of daily life; but they are good for nothing in
the cartoon, if they are there alone. And the worst result of the
system is the intense conceit into which it cultivates a weak mind.
Nothing is so hopeless, so intolerable, as the pride of a foolish
man who has passed through a process of thinking, so as actually to
have found something out. He believes there is nothing else to be
found out in the universe. Whereas the truly great man, on whom the
Revelations rain till they bear him to the earth with their weight,
lays his head in the dust, and speaks thence--often in broken
syllables. Vanity is indeed a very equally divided inheritance among
mankind; but I think that among the first persons, no emphasis is
altogether so strong as that on the German _Ich_. I was once
introduced to a German philosopher-painter before Tintoret's
"Massacre of the Innocents." He looked at it superciliously, and
said it "wanted to be restored." He had been himself several years
employed in painting a "Faust" in a red jerkin and blue fire; which
made Tintoret appear somewhat dull to him.

[42] I have before stated ("Modern Painters" vol. ii.) that the
first function of the imagination is the apprehension of ultimate
truth.

[43] Note especially, in connexion with what was advanced in Vol. II.
respecting our English neatness of execution, how the base workman
has cut the lines of the architecture neatly and precisely round the
abominable head: but the noble workman has used his chisel like a
painter's pencil, and sketched the glory with a few irregular lines,
anything rather than circular; and struck out the whole head in the
same frank and fearless way, leaving the sharp edges of the stone as
they first broke, and flinging back the crest of hair from the
forehead with half a dozen hammer-strokes, while the poor wretch who
did the other was half a day in smoothing its vapid and vermicular
curls.

[44] The decree is quoted by Mutinelli, lib. i. p. 46.

[45] See Appendix 9.

CHAPTER IV.

CONCLUSION.

Sec. I. I fear this chapter will be a rambling one, for it must be a kind
of supplement to the preceding pages, and a general recapitulation of
the things I have too imperfectly and feebly said.

The grotesques of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nature
of which we examined in the last chapter, close