the
picture. But the episodes would have been composed of comely groups or
animated portraits. Guercino, obedient to the religious spirit of the
Counter-Reformation, compels sympathy with ecclesiastical propaganda.

Guido exercised a powerful influence over his immediate successors.
Guercino felt it when he painted that soulless picture of Abraham and
Hagar, in the Brera--the picture which excited Byron's admiration, which
has been praised for its accurate delineation of a teardrop, and which,
when all is reckoned, has just nothing of emotion in it but a frigid
inhumanity. He competed with Guido in the fresco of the Lodovisi Aurora,
a substantial work certainly, yet one that lacks the saving qualities of
the Rospigliosi ceiling--grace and geniality of fancy.

In the history of criticism there are few things more perplexing than
the vicissitudes of taste and celebrity, whereby the idols of past
generations crumble suddenly to dust, while the despised and rejected
are lifted to pinnacles of glory. Successive waves of aesthetical
preference, following one upon the other with curious rapidity, sweep
ancient fortresses of fame from their venerable basements, and raise
upon the crests of wordy foam some delicate seashell that erewhile lay
embedded in oblivious sand. During the last half-century, taste has been
more capricious, revolutionary, and apparently anarchical than at any
previous epoch. The unity of orthodox opinion has broken up. Critics
have sought to display originality by depreciating names famous in
former ages, and by exalting minor stars to the rank of luminaries of
the first magnitude. A man, yet in middle life, can remember with what
reverence engravings after Raphael, the Caracci, and Poussin were
treated in his boyhood; how Fra Angelico and Perugino ruled at a
somewhat later period; how one set of eloquent writers discovered
Blake, another Botticelli, and a third Carpaccio; how Signorelli and
Bellini and Mantegna received tardy recognition; and now, of late years,
how Tiepolo has bidden fair to obtain the European _grido_. He will also
bear in mind that the conditions of his own development--studies in the
Elgin marbles, the application of photography to works of art, the
publications of the Arundel Society, and that genius of new culture in
the air which is more potent than all teaching, rendered for himself
each oracular utterance interesting but comparatively unimportant--as it
were but talk about truth