As for the various departments of painting, which do not presume to make
such high pretensions, they are many. None of them are without their
merit, though none enter into competition with this great universal
presiding idea of the art. The painters who have applied themselves more
particularly to low and vulgar characters, and who express with precision
the various shades of passion, as they are exhibited by vulgar minds
(such as we see in the works of Hogarth) deserve great praise; but as
their genius has been employed on low and confined subjects, the praise
that we give must be as limited as its object. The merrymaking or
quarrelling of the Boors of Teniers; the same sort of productions of
Brouwer, or Ostade, are excellent in their kind; and the excellence and
its praise will be in proportion, as, in those limited subjects and
peculiar forms, they introduce more or less of the expression of those
passions, as they appear in general and more enlarged nature. This
principle may be applied to the battle pieces of Bourgognone, the French
gallantries of Watteau, and even beyond the exhibition of animal life, to
the landscapes of Claude Lorraine, and the sea-views of Vandervelde. All
these painters have, in general, the same right, in different degrees, to
the name of a painter, which a satirist, an epigrammatist, a sonnetteer,
a writer of pastorals, or descriptive poetry, has to that of a poet.

In the same rank, and, perhaps, of not so great merit, is the cold
painter of portraits. But his correct and just imitation of his object
has its merit. Even the painter of still life, whose highest ambition is
to give a minute representation of every part of those low objects, which
he sets before him, deserves praise in proportion to his attainment;
because no part of this excellent art, so much the ornament of polished
life, is destitute of value and use. These, however, are by no means the
views to which the mind of the student ought to be _primarily_ directed.