After Guido Reni add:
‘For with him disappeared the last of those bright clouds,
That on the unsteady breeze of honour sailed
In long procession, calm and beautiful.’[[84]]
After critics and connoisseurs add: ‘Art will not be constrained by mastery, but at sight of the formidable array prepared to receive it,
“Spreads its light wings, and in a moment flies.”[[85]]
The genius of painting lies buried under the Vatican, or skulks behind some old portrait of Titian from which it stole out lately to paint a miniature of Lady Montagu!’
Into opera attitudes? The Champion reads ‘with the flighty French attitudes?’ and proceeds: ‘Were Claude Lorraine, or Nicolas Poussin, formed by the rules of De Piles[[86]] or Du Fresnoy?[[87]] There are no general tickets of admission to the temple of Fame, transferable to large societies, or organized bodies,—the paths leading to it are steep and narrow, for by the time they are worn plain and easy, the niches are full. What extraordinary advances have we made in our own country in consequence of the establishment of the Royal Academy? What greater names has the English School to boast, than those of Hogarth, Reynolds, and Wilson, who owed nothing to it? Even the venerable president of the Royal Academy was one of its founders.[[88]]
‘It is plain then that the sanguine anticipation of the preface-writer, however amiable and patriotic in its motive, has little foundation in fact. It has even less in the true theory and principles of excellence in the art.
‘“It has been often made a subject of complaint,” says a cotemporary critic’ [Here Hazlitt quotes from an article of his used to makeup the ‘Fragment’ Why the Arts are not Progressive? See vol. I. The Round Table, p. 160. He ends with the words ‘mother earth’ and proceeds]: