Note 611 — FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17.

Genius is chiefly exerted in historical pictures; and the art of the painter of portraits is often lost in the obscurity of his subject. But it is in painting as in life; what is greatest is not always best. I should grieve to see Reynolds transfer to heroes and to goddesses, to empty splendour and to airy fiction, that art which is now employed in diffusing friendship, in reviving tenderness, in quickening the affections of the absent, and continuing the presence of the dead.' The Idler, No. 45. 'Southey wrote thirty years later:—'I find daily more and more reason to wonder at the miserable ignorance of English historians, and to grieve with a sort of despondency at seeing how much that has been laid up among the stores of knowledge has been neglected and utterly forgotten.' Southey's Life, ii. 264. On another occasion he said of Robertson:—'To write his introduction to Charles V, without reading these Laws [the Laws of Alonso the Wise], is one of the thousand and one omissions for which he ought to be called rogue, as long as his volumes last. Ib. p. 318