JAMES MILL, Esq. London.

Reverend ROBERT MOREHEAD, A. M. late of Baliol College, Ox-".

ford.

Mr HUGH MURRAY.

JOHN PLAYFAIR, F. R. S. L. and E. Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh.

JAMES PILLANS, F.R.S.E. Rector of the High School, Edinburgh. PETER M. ROGET, M. D. London.

WALTER SCOTT, Esq.

Sir JAMES EDWARD SMITH, M. D. F.R. S. President of the Lin

næan Society.

Mr SYLVESTER, Derby.

Mr STODDART, London.

WILLIAM STEVENSON, Esq. London.

JOHN TAYLOR, Esq. Civil Engineer, London.

WILLIAM WALLACE, F.R.S. E. Professor of Mathematics Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

This list will still be augmented, and the additional names announced at a future period.-The Supplement, like the principal work, will be published in Parts, or Half-volumes, to succeed each other at short intervals; and the Publishers hope that the First Part of Volume I. will be ready to appear in Spring 1815. Edinburgh, September 1814.

IN THE PRESS,

And speedily will be Published,

In one volume quarto,

THE LORD OF THE ISLES:

EDINBURGH,

A POEM.

BY WALTER SCOTT, Esq.

Printed for ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE and Co. Edinburgh; and LONGMAN, HURST, REES, ORME, and BROWN, London.

Of whom may be had New Editions of Mr Scott's other Works.

THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

SEPTEMBER 1814.

No. XLVI.

ARTICLE I. The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knight, late President of the Royal Academy, &c. By JAMES NORTHCOTE, Esq. 4to. London, 1814.

WH

HERE moderate wealth and superficial education are so widely diffused as in these Islands, it is natural that a great number of persons should betake themselves to reading merely to relieve the tediousness of mental vacancy and inaction, and should consequently have recourse to books that merely excite, without straining or fatiguing attention, and keep the faculties of thought awake, without harassing them with the toil of thinking. Hence histories of private and domestic life, whether real or fictitious, whether in the form of biography or novels, become the most popular, and consequently the most lucrative and abundant species of writing; till, by continually pampering and satiating, without at all contributing to feed, nourish, or invigorate public taste, they completely vitiate and enervate it; and render that merely passive and solitary dissipation which assumes the name and form of study, more debasing and destructive to every useful or ornamental power of intellect, than the most constant and frivolous distractions of the most frivolous and promiscuous society.

From this charge, however, the histories of those lives, which have been successfully devoted to the cultivation and improvement of the useful and elegant arts, should be most honourably exempted: since it is chiefly by being made acquainted with the details of their progress, the method of their studies, and the means of their acquirements, together with the adventitious aids which accelerated, or the obstacles which impeded them, that others are enabled to arrive at the same end, by a nearer and more direct. road; and to extend the benefits of improvement and discovery still farther. Successful results seldom carry any internal eviVOL. XXIII. NO. 46.

dence or information of the means by which they have been obtained; more especially in those arts, whose last refinements of excellence are to conceal the difficulty of their means, and make that masterly facility, which has been acquired by the methodical study and toil of years, appear to be the random effusion of playful negligence, or the accidental felicity of a lucky moment: for ignorant and eager students, youths of more rapidity in conception than acuteness or accuracy in observation, continually mistake them; and consequently pursue their studies in an inverted progress:-They begin by effect without labour, and end by labour without effect.

In no art has this preposterous method of imitation been more pernicious than in that of painting; especially among what are called students of genius; whose natural confidence, arising from consciousness of talent, being further exalted by the unmeasured and unqualified applause usually bestowed on the first efforts of premature success, almost always inspires them with a notion that they are born with faculties to overleap the outworks of art, and take the citadel by storm without the drudgery of a sap, or the irksomeness of a previous progress through safe and regular, but slow and circuitous approaches. This impatient celerity of vaulting ambition, which so constantly overleaps itself by premature exertions of strength, might without doubt have been in many instances restrained in its erroneous career, and put into the right road, by timely and accurate information that such was the road, and the only road, by which those, who had most rapidly and effectively obtained its object, had ever pursued it. No one, who had duly traced the gradual and regular progression of Titian and Rubens, from the laborious minuteness, and dry exactitude of their first beginnings, to the rich and pure luxuriance of their full maturity, would ever hope, at least without vanity almost superhuman, to obtain the powers of that maturity, by merely copying their results; or, indeed, by any other means than those by which they had been obtained. Yet such hopes have been entertained, and acted upon, by students of considerable natural talents, and of the greatest zeal and activity in the pursuits of their profession; and their success has been such as might have been reasonably expected. Painting is, in its nature and principle, an imitative art; and consequently, fidelity of imitation must be its first object. Felicity can only be acquired by assiduous prac tice, guided by just taste and discernment.

Of those, who may properly be called the secondary Revivers.

* See Barry's Account of his Studies at Rome.

or Restorers of this art,-that is, those who have raised it, not from a state of total extinction, such as prevailed in the fourteenth century, but from a very low state of debasement and corruption, none is more deserving of honourable notice and consideration, both from its lovers and professors, than he whose life has here been written by a favourite pupil, who had every means of information and observation. Others may have raised it higher; but no one artist ever raised it so high from so low a state of de gradation;-and none perhaps, except Rubens, ever held so high a situation, both in society and art, at the same time. Of his immediate predecessors, indeed, Hogarth had not only preeminent talents in his own particular line of statyrical and moral composition, and expression of character and sentiment in ordinary or familiar life, but also a correct eye for harmony and effect in colours, and a just sense of all other technical excellences. He was not, however, sufficiently master either of his tools or materials, to employ them with any certainty of success; and his still greater deficiency in the academical science of forms, and the power of rendering them with facility and fidelity, increased his perplexities, and frustrated the intentions of his taste, in the embarrassments of his execution. Where he was fortunate enough to succeed by a single effort, as in the first picture in the Marriage à-la-Mode, and the Lady's Last Stake, his pencilling is clean and neat; and his colouring clear, chaste, and harmonious, though not vigorous: But when he was obliged to go over his work again, it becomes crude, harsh, and heavy; and seems to have grown more and more so on every repetition. His contemporaries were not, indeed, much disposed to acknowledge technical merit, when he displayed it; nor was he much disposed to acknowledge the deficiency, where he most evidently wanted it; and those abortive attempts at heroic expression, into which his preposterous vanity led him, inclined men still more to take the scale of his talents from his worst, rather than his best performances, in the style which suited his genius.

The restorers of art from a state of mere debasement and depravity, when the models of better days still exist, have obsta cles to encounter unknown to its first founders, or the restorers of it from a state of utter extinction. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, and Correggio, were so unquestionably supe rior to all their inmediate predecessors, that the most prejudiced lover of antiquity could oppose no objects of humiliating comparison; for even the most impudent quack in criticism could not pretend to produce a wreck or counterfeit of the works of Parrhasius, Zeuxis, or Apelles. But in the last century, still

more than in the present, every auctioneer's, dealer's, and col lector's catalogue, exhibited all the great names of Italy and Flanders; and though the productions imputed to them were either counterfeits below criticism, or ruins in which the painter could scarcely have discovered a trace of his own pencil, they carried all the weight of his authority in the estimation of the possessor; and the living artist, who did not acknowledge and conform to it, was deemed a tasteless barbarian, incapable of perceiving or feeling supreme excellence in his art, and therefore incapable of reaching even mediocrity. Hence the art had dwindled into a mere manufactory of face painting and copying; and theorists began seriously to doubt, whether the English climate and physical organization were competent to produce any thing better.

Unfortunately, however, for these geographical distributions of taste and talent, the same moral causes which operated here, operated in a proportionate degree in those climates, where, in the preceding centuries, the most perfect models that ever the art could boast, were produced. Neither had the leading artists at Rome to lament the want of adequate employment, as they had here; for Pompeo Battoni, and afterwards Raphael Mengs, received the most liberal commissions from the principal sovereigns of Europe; and annually covered sheets of canvas, of whatever dimensions they chose, with simpering virgins, weeping Magdalens, cherry-cheeked angels, and all the allegorical personages of heathen mythology, twisted into every possible variation of the undulating lines of grace and beauty, and trick'd out with all the splendours that the most expensive colours could afford. Still, however, it was mere manufacture; carried on with a larger capital, and with more depth and accuracy of technical science, particularly by Mengs;-but yet without any of that expression of feeling and sentiment-that spontaneous and seemingly fortuitous facility and felicity of exe cution, which is acquired by practice guided by taste, but can neither be learned nor limited by rule; and which, more than any thing else, distinguishes' liberal from mechanic art, and the artist from the artisan. Mr Mengs was, however, not only convinced of the efficacy of his rules, but could trace their principles in the abstract ideas of the perfection of harmonic beauty, defined, or at least attempted to be defined, in the Platonic and Leibnitzian schools of philosophy. So consistent with these sublimated principles was his practice, that his friend and panegyrist found him preparing his mind for the composition of a

*

Mengs' Reflessioni, &c. p. 1.