this union as perfection. To us it would, we feel quite sure, be an
intolerable performance. For this little bit of bad taste he is called
to account by his translator. The author's taste was, after all, we
suspect, rather incomplete; rather the product of an educated eye than
of a mind educated to embrace the Ideal. The fact is, the Ideal in
practice must be the reach of a something which the eye, however
educated, does not altogether find in external nature; but which, from
the data of external nature, the mind creates, partly by combination,
and partly from a power of its own invention altogether. The external
senses in educated man are obedient to this inventive direction of the
mind, and at length receive their greater, perhaps often only,
pleasures from it. It is easy to imagine how the _more evident_ and
real beauties of the inferior schools, for we do not hesitate to speak
of the Italian as the higher, more easily captivate, especially, the
incipient lovers of art. They begin by collecting the Dutch; but as
they advance in taste and knowledge, and acquire the legitimate
feeling for art, they are sure to end with the Italian. The
uninitiated may wonder to be told there is any difficulty in judging
"whether a picture is in good preservation or not." Yet here is a
chapter to teach this "useful knowledge." The "perils that flesh is
heir to," are nothing if compared to the perils that environ the
similitudes of flesh. "_Nos nostraque morti debemur._" Men and
pictures suffer from the doctors as well as from time. Pictures, too,
are often in the "hand of the spoiler," and are subject, with their
owners, to a not very dissimilar quackery of potion and lotion,
undergo as many purifications, nor do they escape the knife and
scarification; are laid upon their backs, rubbed and scrubbed,
skinned, and oftentimes reduced to the very ribs and dead colouring of
what they were. It is surprising how great a number of pictures are
ruined by the cleaners. We are sorry to read this account of
Correggio's celebrated _Notte_. "Even when they do not destroy the
picture entirely, they, at all events, leave the most injurious traces
behind, depriving it of its transparency and harmony, and much of the
effect, rendering it hard, cold, and weak. Of this the admirable
'Night' of Correggio at Dresden presents a very sad example."

We look upon the audacious man who dares to repaint upon an old
picture unnecessarily, and by wholesale, as guil