the pencil of Rubens and Van-dyke, however I may admire, I do not envy
them this power so much as I do the slow, patient, laborious execution
of Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea del Sarto, where every touch
appears conscious of its charge, emulous of truth, and where the painful
artist has so distinctly wrought,

That you might almost say his picture thought.


In the one case the colours seem breathed on the canvas as if by magic,
the work and the wonder of a moment; in the other they seem inlaid in
the body of the work, and as if it took the artist years of unremitting
labour, and of delightful never-ending progress to perfection.[5] Who
would wish ever to come to the close of such works,--not to dwell on
them, to return to them, to be wedded to them to the last? Rubens, with
his florid, rapid style, complains that when he had just learned his
art, he should be forced to die. Leonardo, in the slow advances of his,
had lived long enough!

Painting is not, like writing, what is properly understood by a
sedentary employment. It requires not indeed a strong, but a continued
and steady exertion of muscular power. The precision and delicacy of
the manual operation, makes up for the want of vehemence,--as to balance
himself for any time in the same position the rope-dancer must strain
every nerve. Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an
appetite for one's dinner as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by
riding over Banstead Downs. It is related of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that
'he took no other exercise than what he used in his painting-room,'--the
writer means, in walking backwards and forwards to look at his picture;
but the act of painting itself, of laying on the colours in the proper