subjects may be thus treated. There is a painter commonly thought to
have finished highly, by those who do not look into his manner, whose
dexterous, happy execution was perhaps never surpassed; the consequence
is, that there is "a largeness," in all his pictures. We mean Teniers.
The effect of the elaborate work that has been added to his class of
subjects, is to make them heavy and fatiguing to the eye. He praises
Titian for the same large manner which he had given to his history and
portraits, applied to his landscapes, and instances the back-ground to
the "Peter Martyr." He recommends the same practice in portrait
painting--the first thing to be attained, is largeness and general
effect. The following puts the truth clearly. "Perhaps nothing that we
can say will so clearly show the advantage and excellence of this
faculty, as that it confers the character of genius on works that
pretend to no other merit, in which is neither expression, character,
nor dignity, and where none are interested in the subject. We cannot
refuse the character of genius to the 'Marriage' of Paolo Veronese,
without opposing the general sense of mankind, (great authorities have
called it the triumph of painting,) or to the Altar of St Augustine at
Antwerp, by Rubens, which equally deserves that title, and for the same
reason. Neither of these pictures have any interesting story to support
them. That of Paolo Veronese is only a representation of a great
concourse of people at a dinner; and the subject of Rubens, if it may be
called a subject where nothing is doing, is an assembly of various
saints that lived in different ages. The whole excellence of those
pictures consists in mechanical dexterity, working, however, under the
influence of that comprehensive faculty which I have so often
mentioned."

The power of _a whole_ is exemplified by the anecdote of a child going
through a gallery of old portraits. She paid very little attention to