not hide form, as in the practice of the later schools of Italy and Flanders. The picture of the Spiritual Form of Pitt is a proof of the power of colours unsullied with oil or with any cloggy vehicle. Oil has been falsely supposed to give strength to colours, but a little consideration must show the fallacy of this opinion. Oil will not drink or absorb colour enough to stand the test of any little time and of the air. Let the works of artists since Rubens' time witness to the villainy of those who first brought oil-painting into general opinion and practice, since which we have never had a picture painted that would show itself by the side of an earlier composition. This is an awful thing to say to oil-painters; they may call it madness, but it is true. All the genuine old little pictures are in fresco and not in oil.'
Having settled the true principles and proper materials of colour, he proceeds to open up the mystery of his own productions. Those who failed to comprehend the pictures on looking at them, had only to turn to the following account of the Pitt and the Nelson. 'These two pictures,' he says, 'are compositions of a mythological cast, similar to those Apotheoses of Persian, Hindoo, and Egyptian antiquity, which are still preserved in rude monuments, being copies from some stupendous originals now lost or perhaps buried to some happier age. The artist having been taken, in vision, to the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of
