originality: they are anticipated in their happiest efforts; and if they
are found to differ in anything from their predecessors, it is only in
irregular sallies and trifling conceits. The more extensive therefore
your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled the more
extensive will be your powers of invention; and what may appear still
more like a paradox, the more original will be your conceptions. But the
difficulty on this occasion is to determine who ought to be proposed as
models of excellence, and who ought to be considered as the properest
guides.

To a young man just arrived in Italy, many of the present painters of
that country are ready enough to obtrude their precepts, and to offer
their own performances as examples of that perfection which they affect
to recommend. The modern, however, who recommends _himself_ as a
standard, may justly be suspected as ignorant of the true end, and
unacquainted with the proper object of the art which he professes. To
follow such a guide will not only retard the student, but mislead him.

On whom, then, can he rely, or who shall show him the path that leads to
excellence? The answer is obvious: Those great masters who have
travelled the same road with success are the most likely to conduct
others. The works of those who have stood the test of ages have a claim
to that respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend. The
duration and stability of their fame is sufficient to evince that it has
not been suspended upon the slender thread of fashion and caprice, but
bound to the human heart by every tie of sympathetic approbation.

There is no danger of studying too much the works of those great men, but
how they may be studied to advantage is an inquiry of great importance.