7. That grace is the beautiful or harmonious in what relates to position or motion.
8. That grandeur of motion is unity of motion.
9. That strength is the giving the extremes, softness, the uniting them.
10. That truth is to a certain degree beauty and grandeur, since all things are connected, and all things modify one another in nature. Simplicity is also grand and beautiful for the same reason. Elegance is ease and lightness, with precision.
All this we have, we believe, said before; we shall proceed to such proofs or explanations as we are able to give of it in another article.
At the conclusion of a former article on this subject, we ventured to lay down some general principles, which we shall here proceed to elucidate in such manner as we are able.
1. The first was, that art is (first and last) the imitation of nature.
By nature, we mean actually existing nature, or some one object to be found in rerum naturâ, not an idea of nature existing solely in the mind, got from an infinite number of different objects, but which was never yet embodied in an individual instance. Sir Joshua Reynolds may be ranked at the head of those who have maintained the supposition that nature (or the universe of things) was indeed the groundwork or foundation on which art rested; but that the superstructure rose above it, that it towered by degrees above the world of realities, and was suspended in the regions of thought alone—that a middle form, a more refined idea, borrowed from the observation of a number of particulars, but unlike any of them, was the standard of truth and beauty, and the glittering phantom that hovered round the head of the genuine artist:
‘So from the ground