various masters are now united in one general idea, which is henceforth
to regulate his taste and enlarge his imagination. With a variety of
models thus before him, he will avoid that narrowness and poverty of
conception which attends a bigoted admiration of a single master, and
will cease to follow any favourite where he ceases to excel. This period
is, however, still a time of subjection and discipline. Though the
student will not resign himself blindly to any single authority when he
may have the advantage of consulting many, he must still be afraid of
trusting his own judgment, and of deviating into any track where he
cannot find the footsteps of some former master.

The third and last period emancipates the student from subjection to any
authority but what he shall himself judge to be supported by reason.
Confiding now in his own judgment, he will consider and separate those
different principles to which different modes of beauty owe their
original. In the former period he sought only to know and combine
excellence, wherever it was to be found, into one idea of perfection; in
this he learns, what requires the most attentive survey and the subtle
disquisition, to discriminate perfections that are incompatible with each
other.

He is from this time to regard himself as holding the same rank with
those masters whom he before obeyed as teachers, and as exercising a sort
of sovereignty over those rules which have hitherto restrained him.
Comparing now no longer the performances of art with each other, but
examining the art itself by the standard of nature, he corrects what is
erroneous, supplies what is scanty, and adds by his own observation what
the industry of his predecessors may have yet left wanting to perfection.
Having well established his judgment, and stored his memory, he may now
without fear try the power of his imagination. The mind that has been