Page:Anecdotes of painters, engravers, sculptors and architects, and curiosities of art (IA anecdotesofpaint01spoo).pdf/128

 Haydon, "was the ruin of high art, for the people had not taste enough to feel any sympathy for it independently of religion, and every man who has pursued it since, who had not a private fortune, and was not supported by a pension, like West, became infallibly ruined."

PAINTINGS EVANESCENT.

"Few works are more evanescent than paintings. Sculpture retains its freshness for twenty centuries. The Apollo and the Venus are as they were. But books are perhaps the only productions of man coeval with the human race. Sophocles and Shakspeare can be produced and reproduced forever. But how evanescent are paintings, and must necessarily be! Those of Zeuxis and Apelles are no more, and perhaps they have the same relation to Homer and Æschylus, that those of Raffaelle and Guido have to Dante and Petrarch.

"There is however, one refuge from the despondency of this contemplation. The material part, indeed, of their works must perish, but they survive in the mind of man, and the remembrances of them are transmitted from generation to generation. The poet embodies them in his creations, and the systems of philosophers are modeled to gentleness by their contemplation; opinion, that legislator, is infected with their influence; men become better and wiser; and the unseen seeds are perhaps thus sown which shall produce a plant more excellent than that from which they fell."—Shelley.