bjects.
In his "Danae," the old nurse tries a coin of the golden shower with
her teeth to see if it is true gold; in the "Pool of Bethesda," a
servant of a rich ulcerated lady beats back a poor man that sought the
same celestial remedy. Both circumstances are justly thought, but
rather too ludicrous. It is a much more capital fault that "Danae"
herself is a mere nymph of Drury. He seems to have conceived no higher
idea of beauty.

So little had he eyes to his own deficiencies, that he believed he had
discovered the principle of grace. With the enthusiasm of a
discoverer he cried, "Eureka!" This was his famous line of beauty,
the groundwork of his "Analysis," a book that has many sensible hints
and observations, but that did not carry the conviction nor meet the
universal acquiescence he expected. As he treated his contemporaries
with scorn, they triumphed over this publication, and imitated him to
expose him. Many wretched burlesque prints came out to ridicule his
system. There was a better answer to it in one of the two prints that
he gave to illustrate his hypothesis. In "The Ball," had he confined
himself to such outlines as compose awkwardness and deformity, he
would have proved half his assertion; but he has added two samples of
grace in a young lord and lady that are strikingly stiff and affected.
They are a Bath beau and a country beauty.

But this was the failing of a visionary. He fell afterward into a
grosser mistake. From a contempt of the ignorant virtuosi of the age,
and from indignation at the impudent tricks of picture-dealers, whom
he saw continually recommending and vending vile copies to bubble
collectors, and from having never studied, indeed having seen, few
good pictures of the great Italian masters, he persuaded himself that
the praises bestowed on those glorious works were nothing but the
effects of prejudice. He talked this language till he believed it; and
having heard it often asserted, as is true, that time gives a
mellowness to colors and improves them, he not only denied the
proposition, but maintained that pictures only grew black and worse by
age, not distinguishing between the degrees in which the proposition
might be true or false. He went further; he determined to rival the
ancients, and unfortunately chose one of the finest pictures in
England as the object of his compensation. This was the celebrated
"Sigismonda" of Sir Luke Schaub, now in the possession of the Duke of
Newcastle, s