barbarous ballads, drawings, or carvings, of an early nation. Coarse
nature and crude simplicity are the commencement, as elevated nature and
elegant simplicity are the consummation of art.

"When the Spaniards invaded the palaces of Chili and Peru, they found
them filled with works of art. Cook found considerable beauty of drawing
and skill of workmanship in the ornamented weapons and war-canoes of the
islanders of the South Sea; and in the interior recesses of India,
sculptures and paintings, of no common merit, are found in every
village. In like manner, when Caesar landed among the barbarians of
Britain, he found them acquainted with arts and arms; and his savage
successors, the Saxons, added to unextinguishable ferocity a love of
splendour and a rude sense of beauty, still visible in the churches
which they built, and the monuments which they erected to their princes
and leaders. All those works are of that kind called ornamental: the
graces of true art, the truth of action and the dignity of sentiment are
wanting; and they seem to have been produced by a sort of mechanical
process, similar to that which creates figures in arras. Art is, indeed,
of slow and gradual growth; like the oak, it is long of growing to
maturity and strength. Much knowledge of colour, much skill of hand,
much experience in human character, and a deep sense of light and shade,
have to be acquired, to enable the pencil to embody the conceptions of
genius. The artist has to seek for all this in the accumulated mass of
professional knowledge: which time has gathered for his instruction, and
with his best wisdom, and his happiest fortune, he can only add a little
more information to the common stock, for the benefit of his successors.
In no country has Painting risen suddenly into eminence. While Poetry
takes wing at once, free and unincumbered, she is retarded in her ascent
by the very mechanism to which she must at last owe at least half her
glory. In Britain, Painting was centuries in throwing off the fetters of