is not in overdoing what we are about, but in doing nothing. Rubens had great facility of execution, and seldom went into the details. Yet Raphael, whose oil-pictures were exact and laboured, achieved, according to the length of time he lived, very nearly as much as he. In filling up the parts of his pictures, and giving them the last perfection they were capable of, he filled up his leisure hours, which otherwise would have lain idle on his hands. I have sometimes accounted for the slow progress of certain artists from the unfinished state in which they have left their works at last. These were evidently done by fits and throes-there was no appearance of continuous labour-one figure had been thrown in at a venture, and then another; and in the intervals between these convulsive and random efforts, more time had been wasted than could have been spent in working up each individual figure on the sure principles of art, and by a careful inspection of nature, to the utmost point of practicable perfection. Some persons are afraid of their own works; and having made one or two successful efforts,

attempt nothing ever after. They stand still midway in the road to fame, from being startled at the shadow of their own reputation. This is a needless alarm. If what they have already done possesses real power, this will increase with exercise; if it has not this power, it is not sufficient to ensure them lasting fame. Such delicate pretenders tremble on the brink of ideal perfection, like dewdrops on the edge of flowers; and are fascinated, like so many Narcissuses, with the image of themselves, reflected from the public admiration. It is seldom indeed, that this cautious repose will answer its end. While seeking to sustain our reputation at the height, we are forgotten. Shakespear gave different.advice, and himself acted upon it.

'Perseverance, dear my lord,

Keeps honour bright. To have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail,

In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,

Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons,

That one by one pursue. If you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forth-right,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by,

Or like a gallant horse, fall'n in first rank,

Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,

O'er-run and trampled. Then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours :
For time is like a fashionable host,

That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer. Welcome ever smiles,

And farewell goes out sighing. O let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was; for beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating Time.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise new-born gauds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past;
And give to dust that is a little gilt

More laud than gilt o'er dusted.

The present eye praises the present object."

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.

I cannot very well conceive how it is that some writers (even of taste and genius) spend whole years in mere corrections for the press, as it were-in polishing a line or adjusting a comma. They take long to consider, exactly as there is nothing worth the trouble of a moment's thought; and the more they deliberate, the farther they are from deciding for their

fastidiousness increases with the indulgence of it, nor is there any real ground for preference. They are in the situation of Ned Softly in the TATLER, who was a whole morning debating whether a line of a poetical epistle should run—

or,

"You sing your song with so much art;"

"Your song you sing with so much art."

These are points that it is impossible ever to come to a determination about; and it is only a proof of a little mind ever to have entertained the question at all.

There is a class of persons whose minds seem to move in an element of littleness; or rather, that are entangled in trifling difficulties, and incapable of extricating themselves from them. There was a remarkable instance of this improgressive, ineffectual, restless activity of temper in a late celebrated and very ingenious landscape-painter. "Never ending, still beginning," his mind seemed entirely made up of points and fractions, nor could he by any means arrive at a conclusion

or a valuable whole.

He made it his boast

that he never sat with his hands before him, and yet he never did any thing. His powers and his time were frittered away in an importunate, uneasy, fidgetty attention to little things. The first picture he ever painted (when a mere boy) was a copy of his father's house; and he began it by counting the number of bricks in the front upwards and lengthways, and then made a scale of them on his canvas. This literal style and mode of study stuck to him to the last. He was placed under Wilson, whose example (if any thing could) might have cured him of this pettiness of conception; but nature prevailed, as it almost always docs. To take pains to no purpose, seemed to be his motto, and the delight of his life. He left (when he died, not long ago) heaps of canvasses with elaborately finished pencil outlines on them, and with perhaps a little dead-colouring added here and there. In this state they were thrown aside, as if he grew tired of his occupation the instant it gave a promise of turning to account, and his whole object in the pursuit of art was to erect scaf