“Besides, by all the village boys I’m shamed,
    You, the sun’s son, you rascal?—­you be damn’d.”

Egad—­I’ll put that into Woodstock.[167] It might come well from the old admirer of Shakespeare.  Then Fielding’s lines were not written.  What then?—­it is an anachronism for some sly rogue to detect.  Besides, it is easy to swear they were written, and that Fielding adopted them from tradition.  Walked with Skene on the Calton Hill.

February 13.—­The Institution for the Encouragment of the Fine Arts opens to-day, with a handsome entertainment in the Exhibition-room, as at Somerset House.  It strikes me that the direction given by amateurs and professors to their proteges and pupils, who aspire to be artists, is upon a pedantic and false principle.  All the Fine Arts have it for their highest and more legitimate end and purpose, to affect the human passions, or smooth and alleviate for a time the more unquiet feelings of the mind—­to excite wonder, or terror, or pleasure, or emotion of some kind or other.  It often happens that, in the very rise and origin of these arts, as in the instance of Homer, the principal object is obtained in a degree not equalled by his successors.  But there is a degree of execution which, in more refined times, the poet or musician begins to study, which gives a value of its own to their productions of a different kind from the rude strength of their predecessors.  Poetry becomes complicated in its rules—­music learned in its cadences and harmonies—­rhetoric subtle in its periods.  There is more given to the labour of executing—­less attained by the effect produced.  Still the nobler and popular end of these arts is not forgotten; and if we have some productions too learned, too recherches for public feeling, we have, every now and then, music that electrifies a whole assembly, eloquence which shakes the forum, and poetry which carries men up to the third heaven.  But in painting it is different; it is all become a mystery, the secret of which is lodged in a few connoisseurs, whose object is not to praise the works of such painters as produce effect on mankind at large, but to class them according to their proficiency in the inferior rules of the art, which, though most necessary to be taught and learned, should yet only be considered as the Gradus ad Parnassum—­the steps by which the higher and ultimate object of a great popular effect is to be attained.  They have all embraced the very style of criticism which induced Michael Angelo to call some Pope a poor creature, when, turning his attention from the general effect of a noble statue, his Holiness began to criticise the hem of the robe.  This seems to me the cause of the decay of this delightful art, especially in history, its noblest branch.  As I speak to myself, I may say that a painting should, to be excellent, have something to say to the mind of a man, like myself, well-educated, and susceptible