I am no connaisseur; and I should have lamented, as a misfortune, the want of some fixed principles of taste and criticism to guide my judgment; some nomenclature by which to express certain effects, peculiarities, and excellencies which I felt, rather than understood; if my own ignorance had not afforded considerable amusement to myself, and perhaps to others.  I have derived some gratification from observing the gradual improvement of my own taste:  and from comparing the decisions of my own unassisted judgment and natural feelings, with the fiat of profound critics and connaisseurs:  the result has been sometimes mortifying, sometimes pleasing.  Had I visited Italy in the character of a ready-made connaisseur, I should have lost many pleasures; for as the eye becomes more practised, the taste becomes more discriminative and fastidious; and the more extensive our acquaintance with the works of art, the more limited is our sphere of admiration; as if the circle of enjoyment contracted round us, in proportion as our sense of beauty became more intense and exquisite.  A thousand things which once had power to charm, can charm no longer; but, en revanche, those which do please, please a thousand times more:  thus what we lose on one side, we gain on the other.  Perhaps, on the whole, a technical knowledge of the arts is apt to divert the mind from the general effect, to fix it on petty details of execution.  Here comes a connaisseur, who has found his way, good man! from Somerset House, to the Tribune at Florence:  see him with one hand passed across his brow, to shade the light, while the other extended forwards, describes certain indescribable circumvolutions in the air, and now he retires, now advances, now recedes again, till he has hit the exact distance from which every point of beauty is displayed to the best possible advantage, and there he stands—­gazing, as never gazed the moon upon the waters, or love-sick maiden upon the moon!  We take him perhaps for another Pygmalion?  We imagine that it is those parted and half-breathing lips, those eyes that seem to float in light; the pictured majesty of suffering virtue, or the tears of repenting loveliness; the divinity of beauty, or “the beauty of holiness,” which have thus transfixed him?  No such thing:  it is fleshiness of the tints, the vaghezza of the colouring, the brilliance of the carnations, the fold of a robe, or the fore-shortening of a little finger.  O! whip me such connaisseurs! the critic’s stop-watch was nothing to this.

Mere mechanical excellence, and all the tricks of art have their praise as long as they are subordinate and conduce to the general effect.  In painting as in her sister arts it is necessary

    “Che l’arte che tutto fa nulla si scuopre.”

Of course I do not speak here of the Dutch school, whose highest aim, and highest praise, is exquisite mechanical precision in the representation of common nature and still life:  but of those pictures which are the productions of mind, which address themselves to the understanding, the fancy, the feelings, and convey either a moral or a poetical pleasure.