gains its ends more passively than actively, and its success depends on self, not on others; but this it is also that renders it so despicable. “Tell him his soul lives in an alley,” said Ben Jonson, when Charles I. sent him a niggard gift. The souls of the avaricious live in the narrowest of all alleys; they are shut up in the dreariest solitary confinement, from which they have not the spirit to escape.
We contrived to peep at a few pictures. At Padua, we paid a hurried visit to one or two churches adorned by frescoes by some of the earlier masters, admirable for the artless gesture—the earnest, rapt expression—the power of shewing the soul breathing in the face. Every painter who aims at the ideal—at expressing the purer and higher emotions of the soul, ought to make a particular study of these early Christian paintings; they must not imitate them—true genius, indeed, cannot imitate. He can catch the light which the labours of his predecessors throw over his path; but he will proceed on one shaped out by himself. To imitate Perugino would be to write poetry in the obsolete language of Chaucer. Yet every English writer ought to be familiar with the pathos, sweetness, and delicate truth of one of our greatest poets.
I was sorry not to spend more time at Ferrara;
