Note 11 — ON THE CONVERSATION OF LORDS

As when a person asks you ‘whether you do not find a strong resemblance between Rubens’s pictures and Quarles’s poetry?’—which is owing to the critic’s having lately been at Antwerp and bought an edition of Quarles’s Emblems. Odd combinations must take place where a number of ideas are brought together, with only a thin, hasty partition between them, and without a sufficient quantity of judgment to discriminate. An Englishman, of some apparent consequence passing by the St. Peter Martyr of Titian at Venice, observed ‘It was a copy of the same subject by Domenichino at Bologna.’ This betrayed an absolute ignorance both of Titian and of Domenichino, and of the whole world of art: yet unless I had also seen the St. Peter at Bologna, this connoisseur would have had the advantage of me, two to one, and might have disputed the precedence of the two pictures with me, but that chronology would have come to my aid. Thus persons who travel from place to place, and roam from subject to subject, make up by the extent and discursiveness of their knowledge for the want of truth and refinement in their conception of the objects of it.