to mechanical excellence, and indeed to all the minor beauties of the art.  We almost fear too much has been done this way, because it has been too exclusively pursued, and led astray the public taste to rest satisfied with, and unadvisedly to require, the less important perfections.  From that great style which it may be said it was the sole object of the Discourses to recommend, we are further off than ever.  Even in portrait, there is far less of the historical, than Sir Joshua himself introduced into that department—­an adoption which he has so ably defended by his arguments.  But nothing can be more unlike the true historical, as defined in the precepts of art, than the modern representation of national (in that sense, historical) events.  The precepts of the President have been unread or disregarded by the patronized historical painters of our day.  It would seem to be thought a greater achievement to identify on canvass the millinery that is worn, than the characters of the wearers, silk stockings, and satins, and faces, are all of the same common aim of similitude; arrangement, attitude, and peculiarly inanimate expression, display of finery, with the actual robes, as generally announced in the advertisement, render such pictures counterparts, or perhaps inferior counterfeits to Mrs Jarley’s wax-work.  And, like the wax-work, they are paraded from town to town, to show the people how much the tailor and mantua-maker have to do in state affairs; and that the greatest of empires is governed by very ordinary-looking personages.  Even the Venetian painters, called by way of distinction the “Ornamental School,” deemed it necessary to avoid prettinesses and pettinesses, and by consummate skill in artistical arrangement in composition, in chiaro-scuro and colour, to give a certain greatness to the representations of their national events.  There is not, whatever other faults they may have, this of poverty, in the public pictures of Venice; they are at least of a magnificent ambition:  they are far removed from the littleness of a show.  We are utterly gone out of the way of the first principles of art in our national historical pictures.  Yet was the great historical the whole subject of the Discourses—­it was to be the only worthy aim of the student.  If the advice and precepts of Sir Joshua Reynolds have, then, been so entirely disregarded, it may be asked what benefit he has conferred upon the world by his Discourses.  We answer, great.  He has shown what should be the aim of art, and has therefore raised it in the estimation of the cultivated.  His works are part of our standard literature; they are in the hands of readers, of scholars; they materially help in the formation of a taste by which literature is to be judged and relished.  Even those who never acquire any very competent knowledge of, or love for pictures, do acquire a respect for art, connect it with classical poetry—­the highest poetry, with Homer, with the Greek drama, with all they have read of the