What would such a man answer if anybody should tell him, “That’s your mistake; a statuary never carved that figure.  It is made, I confess, with an excellent gusto, and according to the rules of perfection; but yet it is chance alone made it.  Among so many pieces of marble there was one that formed itself of its own accord in this manner; the rains and winds have loosened it from the mountains; a violent storm has thrown it plumb upright on this pedestal, which had prepared itself to support it in this place.  It is a perfect Apollo, like that of Belvedere; a Venus that equals that of the Medicis; an Hercules, like that of Farnese.  You would think, it is true, that this figure walks, lives, thinks, and is just going to speak.  But, however, it is not in the least beholden to art; and it is only a blind stroke of chance that has thus so well finished and placed it.”

Sect.  VIII.  Fourth Comparison, drawn from a Picture.

If a man had before his eyes a fine picture, representing, for example, the passage of the Red Sea, with Moses, at whose voice the waters divide themselves, and rise like two walls to let the Israelites pass dryfoot through the deep, he would see, on the one side, that innumerable multitude of people, full of confidence and joy, lifting up their hands to heaven; and perceive, on the other side, King Pharaoh with the Egyptians frighted and confounded at the sight of the waves that join again to swallow them up.  Now, in good earnest, who would be so bold as to affirm that a chambermaid, having by chance daubed that piece of cloth, the colours had of their own accord ranged themselves in order to produce that lively colouring, those various attitudes, those looks so well expressing different passions, that elegant disposition of so many figures without confusion, that decent plaiting of draperies, that management of lights, that degradation of colours, that exact perspective—­in short, all that the noblest genius of a painter can invent?  If there were no more in the case than a little foam at the mouth of a horse, I own, as the story goes, and which I readily allow without examining into it, that a stroke of a pencil thrown in a pet by a painter might once in many ages happen to express it well.  But, at least, the painter must beforehand have, with design, chosen the most proper colours to represent that foam, in order to prepare them at the end of his pencil; and, therefore, it were only a little chance that had finished what art had begun.  Besides, this work of art and chance together being only a little foam, a confused object, and so most proper to credit a stroke of chance—­an object without form, that requires only a little whitish colour dropped from a pencil, without any exact figure or correction of design.  What comparison is there between that foam with a whole design of a large continued history, in which the most fertile fancy and the boldest genius, supported by the perfect knowledge of rules,