or a St. Jerome, was as much admired for its spirited and characteristic roughness, as for its equality and smoothness in his angels and madonnas,-what must be the case with men who have been tethered all their lives in a clump or a belt?

There is another instance of contrast between two eminent painters, Albano and Mola, which I cannot forbear mentioning, as it confirms the alliance between roughness and picturesqueness, and between smoothness and beauty; and as it shews, in the latter case, the consequent danger of sameness. Of all the painters who have left behind them a high reputation, none perhaps, was more uniformly smooth than Albano, or less often deviated into abruptness of any kind: none also have greater monotony of character; but, from the extreme beauty and delicacy of his forms. and his tints, and his exquisite finishing, few pictures are more generally captivating. Mola, the scholar of Albano, (and that circumstance makes it more singular) is as remarkable for many of those opposite

qualities which distinguish S. Rosa, though he has not the boldness and animation of that original genius. There is hardly any painter, whose pictures more immediately catch the eye of a connoisseur than those of Mola, or less attract the notice of a person unused to painting. Salvator has a savage grandeur, often in the highest degree sublime; and sublimity in any shape, will command attention: but Mola's scenes and figures, are for the most part neither sublime nor beautiful; they are purely picturesque: his touch is less rough than Salvator's; his colouring has, in general, more richness and variety; and his pictures seem to me the most perfect examples of the higher stile of picturesqueness: infinitely removed from vulgar nature, but having neither the softness and delicacy of beauty, nor that grandeur of conception which produces the sublime.

CHAPTER IV.

FROM all that has been stated in the last chapter, picturesqueness appears to hold a station between beauty and sublimity; and on that account, perhaps, is more frequently, and more happily blended with them both, than they are with each other. It is, however, perfectly distinct from either. Beauty and picturesqueness are indeed evidently founded on very opposite qualities; the one on smooth

ness, the other on roughness; the one on gradual, the other on sudden variation; the one on ideas of youth and freshness, the other on those of age, and even of decay.

But as most of the qualities of visible beauty are made known to us through the medium of another sense, the sight itself is hardly more to be considered than the touch, in regard to all those sensations which are excited by beautiful forms; and the distinction between the beautiful and the picturesque, will, perhaps, be most strongly pointed out by means of the latter sense. I am aware that this is liable to a gross and obvious ridicule; but for that reason, none but gross and commonplace minds will dwell upon it.

Mr. Burke has observed, that "men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty;" he adds, "I call beauty a social quality; for where women and

men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them (and there are many that do so) they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them*."

These sentiments of tenderness and affection, nature has taught us to express by caresses, by gentle pressure; these are the endearments we make use of, where sex is totally out of the question, to beautiful children, to beautiful animals, and even to things inanimate; and where the size and character, as in trees, buildings, &c. exclude any such relation, still something of the same difference of impression between them and rugged objects appears to subsist; that impression, however, is diminished, as the size of any beautiful object is encreased; and as it approaches towards

Sublime and Beautiful, p, 66,