venerated works of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Apelles; and having no too nice discrimination, are credulous of, or anticipate by remembering what has been done and valued—­the honour of the profession.  We assert that, by bringing the precepts of art within the pale of our accepted literature, Sir Joshua Reynolds has given to art a better position.  Would that there were no counteracting circumstances which still keep it from reaching its proper rank!  Some there are, which materially degrade it, amongst which is the attempt to force patronage; the whole system of Art Unions, and of Schools of Design, the “in forma pauperis” petitioning and advertising, and the rearing innumerable artists, ill-educated in all but drawing, and mere degrading still, the binding art, as it were, apprenticed to manufacture in such Schools of Design; connecting, in more than idea, the drawer of patterns with the painter of pictures.  Hence has arisen, and must necessarily arise, an inundation of mediocrity, the aim of the painter being to reach some low-prize mark, an unnatural competition, inferior minds brought into the profession, a sort of painting-made-easy school, and pictures, like other articles of manufacture, cheap and bad.  We should say decidedly, that the best consideration for art, and the best patronage too, that we would give to it, would be to establish it in our universities of Cambridge and Oxford.  In those venerated places to found professorships, that a more sure love and more sure taste for it may be imbedded with every other good and classical love and taste in the early minds of the youth of England’s pride, of future patrons; and where painters themselves may graduate, and associate with all noble and cultivated minds, and be as much honoured in their profession as any in those usually called “learned.”  But to return to Sir Joshua.  He conferred upon his profession not more benefit by his writings and paintings, than by his manners and conduct.  To say that they were irreproachable would be to say little—­they were such as to render him an object of love and respect.  He adorned a society at that time remarkable for men of wit and wisdom.  He knew that refinement was necessary for his profession, and he studiously cultivated it—­so studiously, that he brought a portion of his own into that society from which he had gathered much.  He abhorred what was low in thought, in manners, and in art.  And thus he tutored his genius, which was great rather from the cultivation of his judgment, by incessantly exercising his good sense upon the task before him, than from any innate very vigorous power.  He thought prudence the best guide of life, and his mind was not of an eccentric daring, to rush heedlessly beyond the bounds of discretion.  And this was no small proof of his good sense; when the prejudice of the age in which he lived was prone to consider eccentricity as a mark of genius; and genius itself, inconsistently with the very term of a silly admiration,