in the "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 398, will be found an
interesting account of his museum at Antwerp.--ED.]

[Footnote B: The late Sir Martin Archer Shee, P.R.A. This accomplished
artist, who possessed a large amount of poetical and literary power, asks,
"What is there of _intellectual_ in the operations of the poet which the
painter does not equal? What is there of _mechanical_ which he does not
surpass? The advantage which poetry possesses over painting in continued
narration and successive impression, cannot be advanced as a peculiar
merit of the poet, since it results from the nature of language, and is
common to prose." Poetry he values as the earliest of arts, painting as
the latest and most refined.--ED.]

Who has not heard of that one common principle which unites the
intellectual arts, and who has not felt that the nature of their genius is
similar in their distinct works? Hence curious inquiries could never
decide whether the group of the Laocoön in sculpture preceded or was
borrowed from that in poetry. Lessing conjectures that the sculptor copied
the poet. It is evident that the agony of Laocoön was the common end where
the sculptor and the poet were to meet; and we may observe that the
artists in marble and in verse skilfully adapted their variations to their
respective art: the one having to prefer the _nude_, rejected the veiling
fillet from the forehead, that he might not conceal its deep expression,
and the drapery of the sacrificial robe, that he might display the human
form in visible agony; but the other, by the charm of verse, could invest
the priest with the pomp of the pontifical robe without hiding from us the
interior sufferings of the human victim. We see they obtained by different
means, adapted to their respective arts, that common end which each
designed; but who will decide which invention preceded the other, or who
was the greater artist?