SIR,
As you have written on the Greek arts and artists, I wish you had made your treatise as much the object of your caution as the Greek artists made their works; which, before dismissing them, they exhibited to publick view, in order to be examined by everybody, and especially by competent judges of the art. The trial was held during the grand, chiefly the Olympian, games; and all Greece was interested on Ætion’s producing his picture of the nuptials of Alexander and Roxana. You, Sir, wanted a Proxenidas to be judged by, as well as that artist; and had it not been for your mysterious concealment, I might have communicated your treatise, before its publication, to some learned men and connoisseurs of my acquaintance, without mentioning the author’s name.
One of them visited Italy twice, where he devoted all his time to a most anxious examination of painting, and particularly several months to each eminent picture, at the very place where it was painted; the only method, you know, to form a connoisseur. The judgment of a man able to tell you which of Guido’s altar-pieces is painted on taffeta, or linnen, what sort of wood Raphael chose for his transfiguration, &c. the judgment of such a man, I fancy, must be allowed to be decisive.
Another of my acquaintance has studied antiquity: he knows it by the very smell;
Callet & Artificem solo deprendere Odore.
Sectan. Sat.
He can tell you the number of knots on Hercules’s club; has reduced Nestor’s goblet to the modern measure: nay, is suspected of meditating solutions to all the questions proposed by Tiberius to the grammarians.
A third, for several years past, has neglected every thing but hunting after ancient coins. Many a new discovery we owe to him; especially some concerning the history of the ancient coiners; and, as I am told, he is to rouse the attention of the world by a Prodromus concerning the coiners of Cyzicum.
What a number of reproaches might you have escaped, had you submitted your Essay to the judgment of these gentlemen! they were pleased to acquaint me with their objections, and I should be sorry, for your honour, to see them published.