147. Antient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece, and the servant of Rome.
148. The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means. If they had schools, the Ionian, that of Athens and of Sicyon appear to have directed their instruction to one grand principle, proportion: this was the stamen which they drew out into one immense connected web; whilst modern art, with its schools of designers, colourists, machinists, eclectics, is but a tissue of adventitious threads. Apollonius and the sculptor of the small Hesperian Hercules in bronze are distinguished only by the degree of execution; whilst M. Angelo and Bernini had no one principle in common but that of making groups and figures.
149. Art among a religious race produces reliques; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.
150. Modern art, reared by superstition in Italy, taught to dance in France, plumped up to unwieldiness in Flanders, reduced to "chronicle small beer" in Holland, became a rich old woman by "suckling fools" in England.
151. The rules of art are either immediately supplied by Nature herself, or selected from the compendiums of her students who are called masters and founders of schools. The imitation of Nature herself leads to style, that of the schools to manner.
Coroll.—The line of Michael Angelo is uniformly grand; character and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur:—the child, the female, meanness, deformity were indiscriminately stamped with grandeur; a beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man, his men are a race of giants.