107. Disproportion of parts is the element of hugeness,--proportion, of
grandeur; all Oriental, all Gothic styles of Architecture, are huge; the
Grecian alone, is grand.
108. The female, able to invigorate her taste without degenerating into
a pedant, sloven or virago, may give her hand to the man of elegance,
who scorns to sacrifice his sense to the presiding phantoms of an
effeminate age.
109. The collector who arrogates not to himself the praise bestowed on
his collections, and the reader who fancies himself not the author of
the beauties he recites to an admiring circle--are not the last of men.
110. The epoch of rules, of theories, poetics, criticisms in a nation,
will add to their stock of authors in the same proportion as it
diminishes their stock of genius: their productions will bear the stamp
of study, not of nature; they will adopt, not generate; sentiment will
supplant images, and narrative invention; words will be no longer the
dress but the limbs of composition, and feeble elegance will supply the
want of nerves.
111. He "lisped not in numbers, no numbers came to him," though he count
his verses by thousands, who has not learnt to distinguish the harmony
of two lines from that of a period--whom dull monotony of ear condemns
to the drowsy psalmody of one returning couplet.
112. Some seek renown as the Parthians sought victory--by seeming to fly
from it.
113. He has more than genius--he is a hero--who can check his powers in
their full career to glory, merely not to crush the feeble on his road.
114. He who could have the choice, and should prefer to be the first
painter of insects, of flowers, or of drapery, to being the second in
the ranks of history, though degraded to the last class of art, would
undoubtedly be in the first of men by the decision of Cæsar.
115. Such is the aspiring nature of man, that nothing wounds the copyist
more sorely than the suspicion of being thought what he is.
116. He who depends for all upon his model, should treat no other
subject but his model.
117. The praises lavished on the sketches of vigorous conception, only
sharpen the throes of labour in finishing.
118. As far as the medium of an art can be taught, so far is the artist
confined to the class of mere mechanics; he only then elevates himself
to talent, when he imparts to his method, or his tool, some unattainable
or exclusive excellence of his own.
119. None but the first can represent the first. Genius, absorbed by the
subject, hastens to the centre; and from that point disseminates, to
that leads back the rays: talent, full of its own dexterities, begins to
point the rays before they have a centre, and aggregates a mass of
secondary beauties.
120. The ear absorbed in harmonies of its own creation, is deaf to all
external ones.