And leave itself unfurnish’d.”
Such power of estimating artistic skill authorises the supposition that Shakespeare himself had made the painter’s art a subject of more than accidental study; else whence such expressions as those which in the Antony, act ii. sc. 2, lines 201–209, vol. ix. p. 38, are applied to Cleopatra?—
“For her own person.
It beggar’d all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,