up from the second court of the palace on the right hand, and lead
you to the south prospect.

I hinted in my last that King William brought into England the love
of fine paintings as well as that of fine gardens; and you have an
example of it in the cartoons, as they are called, being five
pieces of such paintings as, if you will believe men of nice
judgment and great travelling, are not to be matched in Europe.
The stories are known, but especially two of them--viz., that of
St. Paul preaching on Mars Hill to the self-wise Athenians, and
that of St. Peter passing sentence of death on Ananias--I say,
these two strike the mind with the utmost surprise, the passions
are so drawn to the life; astonishment, terror, and death in the
face of Ananias, zeal and a sacred fire in the eyes of the blessed
Apostle, fright and surprise upon the countenances of the beholders
in the piece of Ananias; all these describe themselves so naturally
that you cannot but seem to discover something of the like
passions, even in seeing them.

In the other there is the boldness and courage with which St. Paul
undertook to talk to a set of men who, he knew, despised all the
world, as thinking themselves able to teach them anything. In the
audience there is anticipating pride and conceit in some, a smile
or fleer of contempt in others, but a kind of sensible conviction,
though crushed in its beginning, on the faces of the rest; and all
together appear confounded, but have little to say, and know
nothing at all of it; they gravely put him off to hear him another
time; all these are seen here in the very dress of the face--that
is, the very countenances which they hold while they listen to the
new doctrine which the Apostle preached to a people at that time