glaring and flickering light, Blake
is greater than Rembrandt.

7. Richter.

I have already told you what to guard against in looking at his works. I
am a little doubtful whether I have done well in including them in this
catalogue at all; but the fancies in them are so pretty and numberless,
that I must risk, for their sake, the chance of hurting you a little in
judgment of style. If you want to make presents of story-books to
children, his are the best you can now get.

8. Rossetti.

An edition of Tennyson, lately published, contains woodcuts from
drawings by Rossetti and other chief Pre-Raphaelite masters. They are
terribly spoiled in the cutting, and generally the best part, the
expression of feature, _entirely_ lost;[268] still they are full of
instruction, and cannot be studied too closely. But observe, respecting
these woodcuts, that if you have been in the habit of looking at much
spurious work, in which sentiment, action, and style are borrowed or
artificial, you will assuredly be offended at first by all genuine work,
which is intense in feeling. Genuine art, which is merely art, such as
Veronese's or Titian's, may not offend you, though the chances are that
you will not care about it: but genuine works of feeling, such as Maude
and Aurora Leigh in poetry, or the grand Pre-Raphaelite designs in
painting, are sure to offend you; and if you cease to work hard, and
persist in looking at vicious and false art, they will continue to
offend you. It will be well, therefore, to have one type of entirely
false art, in order to know what to guard against. Flaxman's outlines to
Dante contain, I think, examples of almost every kind of falsehood and
feebleness which it is possible for a trained artist, not base in
thought, to commit or admit, both in design and execution. Base or
degraded choice of subject, such as you will constantly find in Teniers
and others of the Dutch painters, I need not, I hope, warn you against;
you will simply turn away from it in disgust; while mere bad or feeble
drawing, which makes mistakes in every direction at once, cannot teach
you the particular sort of educated fallacy in question. But, in these
designs of Flaxman's, you have gentlemanly feeling, and fair knowledge
of anatomy, and firm setting down of lines, all applied in the
foolishest and worst possible way; you cannot have a more finished
example of learned error, amiable want of meaning, and bad drawing with
a steady hand.[2