At page 29, Mr. Ward states (and with every appearance of believing it) that "Cicero was once a lisping infant, and Sampson, at one period, could not go alone;"—to which assertions we must beg to add, for Mr. Ward's satisfaction, that "Rome was not built in a day."
In his simple style, at page 30, Mr. Ward, speaking of ignorance, says,—
"Loose veins of thought, imaginative intellects, evaporation. As the school-boy's frothy bubble, rising from the turbid elements" soap and water, "its inflated globule exhibits in proud mimicry the Rainbow's gaily painted hues, and calls rude mirth to dance upon its glittering surface, when suddenly it bursts, and all is gone!"
We shall conclude our extracts from this explanatory pamphlet with the following:—
"Shapeless Forms of Death.—Perhaps no part of picturesque representation is so difficult as this. The poet here has much the advantage. Ossian may, by a language all understand, throw the imagination into a delirium, and there leave it bewildered and wandering, in all the confusion of material immateriality; but in painting it is necessary to give a substantial shape to a shapeless form, and substance to a vision. It is not for him to give the ghost of my father as a misty cloud covering a whole mountain, or enlarging itself to the broad expanse of the capacious plain, like the flaky layers of a thick fog, on the opening dawn of a mist-dispersing sunbeam. But the painter must embody disembodied beings, and give 'to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name.' Here the various shapes of blood and carnage are to be contemplated, in the imagery depicted, as cannon-balls, bomb-shells, fiery rockets, swords, spears, and bayonets, with all the horrible effects of their operations; as moving in the conflicted elements; from the head of death's gloomy tribes, the large death-bat, under the arm of the fell monster Death, who is grinning with savage pleasure at the havoc he is making. The monsters are breathing fire, and from their pestiferous dugs dropping streams of blood, as the milk of their nourishment."
Having given some of Mr. Ward's ideas as they were written, we leave those who have not seen his picture to judge what such ideas must be, upon canvas, with a clumsy hand, and the worst possible taste.
To say that Mr. Ward is mad, is not what we would pretend to say; but coupling his painting with the articles which we have caught and preserved, from his pen, we must believe that there are many very worthy persons at present in Bedlam, who could paint allegories full as well, and describe their meaning afterwards with infinitely more perspicuity.
All we have to do in this affair is to call upon the Directors of the British Institution, if they mean to patronise real merit, or to make their rewards honourable and of value, to disclaim all approbation of the most illustrious and full-sized specimen of pictorial Humbug that ever drew shillings out of the pockets of John Bull.
We have indeed been told that the Institution have (somewhat too late) discovered that they employed an animal painter, to paint them an allegorical picture—they were not aware of their mistake in the outset; but in order to rectify it and induce Mr. Ward to rub out his allegory, they have resolved, it is said, to give him an opportunity of showing his talents in his own line, by sitting to him for their likenesses,—it is added that the portrait of Mr. Richard Payne Knight is already in a high state of forwardness.