confidence, of its lofty self-esteem, and you clip the wings of the
eagle: you domesticate, it is true, the wanderer you could not hitherto
comprehend, in the narrow bounds of your household affections; you abase
and tame it more to the level of your ordinary judgments, but you take
from it the power to soar; the hardihood which was content to brave the
thundercloud and build its eyrie on the rock, for the proud triumph of
rising above its kind, and contemplating with a nearer eye the majesty
of heaven.

But if something of presumption is a part of the very essence of genius,
in Warner it was doubly natural, for he was still in the heat and flush
of a design, the defects of which he had not yet had the leisure to
examine; and his talents, self-taught and self-modelled, had
never received either the excitement of emulation or the chill of
discouragement from the study of the masterpieces of his art.

The painter had not been long alone in his concealment before he heard
steps; his heart beat violently, the door opened, and he saw, through
a small hole which he had purposely made in the curtain, a man with a
benevolent and prepossessing countenance, whom he instantly recognized
as Sir Joshua Reynolds, enter the room, accompanied by Talbot. They
walked up to the picture, the painter examined it closely, and in
perfect silence. "Silence," thought Warner, "is the best homage of
admiration;" but he trembled with impatience to hear the admiration
confirmed by words,--those words came too soon.

"It is the work of a clever man, certainly," said Sir Joshua; "but"
(terrible monosyllable) "of one utterly unskilled in the grand
principles of his art--look here, and here, and here, for instance;" and
the critic, perfectly unconscious of the torture he inflicted, proceeded
to point out the errors of the work. Oh! the agony, the withering agony
of that moment to the ambitious artist! In vain he endeavoured to bear
up against the judgment,--in vain he endeavoured to persuade himself
that it was the voice of envy which in those cold, measured, defining
accents, fell like drops of poison upon his heart. He felt at once, and
as if by a magical inspiration, the truth of the verdict; the scales
of self-delusion fell from his eyes; by a hideous mockery, a kind of
terrible pantomime, his goddess seemed at a word, a breath, transformed
into a monster: life, which had been so lately concentrated into
a single hope, seemed now, at once and fo