[235] The great picture by Dosso Dossi, to which I have alluded, is in the Modenese gallery.
[236] The passage from Lodovico Caracci through Poussin to Reynolds is direct and unbroken. 'Poussin,' says Lanzi, 'ranked Domenichino directly next to Raffaello.' History of Painting in Italy, Engl. Tr. vol. iii. p. 84.
[237] Perhaps a generation will yet arise which shall take the Caracci and their scholars into favor, even as people of refinement in our own days find a charm in patches, powder, perukes, sedan-chairs, patchouli, and other lumber from the age despised by Keats. I remember visiting a noble English lady at her country seat. We drank tea in her room, decorated by a fashionable 'Queen Anne' artist. She told us that the quaintly pretty furniture of the last century which adorned it had recently been brought down from the attic, whither her fore bears had consigned it as tasteless—Gillow in their minds superseding Chippendale.
[238] It is only because I am an Englishman, writing a popular book for English folk, that I thus spend time in noticing the opinions of Joshua Reynolds. Addressing a European audience in this year grace, I should not have thought of eddying about his obsolete doctrine.
[239] Twenty millions of years is of course a mere symbol, x or y.