Now what was this new language but the product of other minds,—­of successive minds, amending, enlarging, elaborating, through successive ages, till, fitted to all its wants, it became true to the Ideal, and the vernacular tongue of genius through all time?  The first inventor of verse was but the prophetic herald of Homer, Shakspeare, and Milton.  And what was Rome then but the great University of Art, where all this accumulated learning was treasured?

Much has been said of self-taught geniuses, as opposed to those who have been instructed by others:  but the distinction, it appears to us, is without a difference; for it matters not whether we learn in a school or by ourselves,—­we cannot learn any thing without in some way recurring to other minds.  Let us imagine a poet who had never read, never heard, never conversed with another.  Now if he will not be taught in any thing by another, he must strictly preserve this independent negation.  Truly the verses of such a poet would be a miracle.  Of similar self-taught painters we have abundant examples in our aborigines,—­but nowhere else.

But, while we maintain, as a positive law of our nature, the necessity of mental intercourse with our fellow-creatures, in order to the full developement of the individual, we are far from implying that any thing which is actually taken from others can by any process become our own, that is, original.  We may reverse, transpose, diminish, or add to it, and so skilfully that no scam or mutilation shall be detected; and yet we shall not make it appear original,—­in other words, true, the offspring of one mind.  A borrowed thought will always be borrowed; as it will be felt as such in its effect, even while we are ourselves unconscious of the fact:  for it will want that effect of life, which only the first mind can give it[3].

Of the multifarious retailers of the second-hand in style, the class is so numerous as to make a selection difficult:  they meet us at every step in the history of the Art.  One instance, however, may suffice, and we select Vernet, as uniting in himself a singular and striking example of the false and the true; and also as the least invidious instance, inasmuch as we may prove our position by opposing him to himself.

In the landscapes of Vernet, (when not mere views,) we see the imitator of Salvator, or rather copyist of his lines; and these we have in all their angular nakedness, where rocks, trees, and mountains are so jagged, contorted, and tumbled about, that nothing but an explosion could account for their assemblage.  They have not the relation which we sometimes find even in a random collocation, as in the accidental pictures of a discolored wall; for the careful hand of the contriver is traced through all this disorder; nay, the very execution, the conventional dash of pencil, betrays what a lawyer would call the malice prepense of the Artist in their strange disfigurement.  To many this may appear like hypercriticism; but we sincerely believe that no one, even among his admirers, has ever been deceived into a real sympathy with such technical flourishes:  they are felt as factitious; as mere diagrams of composition deduced from pictures.