own art, the Sculptor was no less eminent in his.

I shall now proceed to show the fallacy of the supposition that the Poet was the imitator of the Artist. Some writers * seem to consider this idea as certain. I do not know that they have any historical grounds for their opinion, which they appear to rest solely on the idea that the work of Art is of too great excellence to have been the production of a period comparatively late. In short, they pretend that it could have belonged to no other age than that in which art had attained its highest perfection, because its merits are sufficient to place it on a level with the most admired works of antiquity.

It has already been shown that, admirable as is the picture drawn by Virgil, it contains some features which the artist could not with propriety adopt. It is evident, then, that the proposition so often maintained, that a good poetical representation must necessarily produce a good picture, and that the poet's description is excel

* See Note 19, end of volume.

lent only when it can be in every point adopted by the artist, admits of some limitation. Indeed, the necessity for this limitation will be sufficiently apparent, even without the confirmation of examples, when we reflect on the extensive sphere over which poetry holds dominion, the boundless range of the imagination, and the spirituality of its images, which may be crowded into the closest contact with each other, without any of that mutual concealment or injury which would necessarily result from a similar arrangement of the things themselves, or of the natural symbols of those images within the narrow limits of space or time.

But though, to use a mathematical phrase, the less cannot include the greater, yet there is clearly no absurdity in holding that the greater may contain the less. My meaning is, that, though it does not necessarily follow that every image of the descriptive poet should produce a good effect on the canvass or the marble, yet each trait expressed with success by the Artist will certainly be effective when transferred to the work of the Poet. The beauties developed in a work of art are not approved by the eye itself,

but by the imagination through the medium of the eye; and so long as the same images are presented to the imagination, whether by means of arbitrary or natural signs, the same pleasure will always be awakened, though not, perhaps, in the same degree.

This point being settled, I must confess that it seems to me much more difficult to believe that Virgil imitated the Sculptor, than that the contrary was the case. In supposing that the Sculptor has imitated the Poet, I can at once account satisfactorily for all the alterations he has made. He was under the necessity of departing from his model, since to have followed him too slavishly would have occasioned inconveniences in his work, which do not appear in the other. But where was the necessity for variation on the part of the Poet? What had he to do, in order to produce a splendid picture, but simply to copy the groupe faithfully in each and every particular? I can, indeed, very well conceive how the operations of his fancy

*

might lead him to introduce some additional features of his own, but I can by no means understand why he should think it necessary to substitute these for the beautiful lineaments already before his eyes.

I am even inclined to think that, had Virgil taken the groupe as his model, he would scarcely have remained satisfied with merely hinting at the entanglement of all the three bodies in one knot. The idea must have struck him too forcibly, its admirable effect must have been too apparent, not to have induced him to make it a more prominent feature in his narrative. I have already said that a more minute delineation of it would have been out of place. True; but a single word more would perhaps have been sufficient to have given it a more decided expression, even amidst the obscurity in which the

poet found it necessary to leave it. If the artist, without this additional help, could detect the latent idea, surely the poet, when he beheld it fully developed in the artist's work, would never have left his own without it.

Again, the Artist had the strongest possible

reasons for not allowing the sufferings of Laocoon to appear to break out into a scream. But what powerful inducement could the Poet have had, with so striking a combination of pain and beauty in the work of art before him, to pass over unnoticed the idea of patience and fortitude suggested by this combination, and scare our ears instead with the frightful shrieks of his Laocoon? Richardson endeavours to account for this mode of treatment by supposing that the object of the Poet was, not so much to awaken sympathy for Laocoon among the Trojans, as horror and dread. This I am willing to admit ; although Richardson does not seem to have considered that the Poet does not narrate the story in his own person, but represents Æneas as describing it, and that to Dido, whose sympathy he was so anxious to excite. It is not, however, the shrieking that surprises me, but the absence of all gradation of emotions leading to it, which would have been so naturally suggested by the sculpture, if Virgil had taken it for his model. Richardson next goes on to say,* that, as the * See Note 21, end of volume.