In common courtesy I must make but brief mention of a very clumsy, and ill-drawn child, by De Broisefremont:  and hasten, in the next room, to the magnificent picture of Diana and Endymion, painted by Guerin in 1810, and lately engraved.  This picture is a very fair illustration of the merits and demerits of the FRENCH SCHOOL OF PAINTING.  The drawing of Endymion is, upon the whole, good; but a palpable copy of the antique.  This necessarily gives it somewhat an air of affectation.  The shepherd lies upon a bed of clouds, (terminated by an horizon which is warmed by the rays of a setting sun) very gracefully and perhaps naturally.  He seems to sleep soundly.  His whole figure and countenance glow with the warmth of beauty and youth.  I will not disturb his slumbers by finding the least fault—­even with the disposition of the extremities.  But his nightly visitor—­the enamoured goddess—­is, of all female figures which I have ever seen upon canvass, one of the most affected, meagre, and uninteresting.  Diana has been exchanged for an opera dancer.  The waist is pinched in, the attitude is full of conceit, and there is a dark shadow about the neck, as if she had been trying some previous experiment with a rope!  Endymion could never open his eyes to gaze upon a figure so utterly unworthy of the representation of an enamoured deity.[190] The Cupids must also be condemned; for they are poor in form, and indifferent in execution.  The back ground has considerable merit:  but I fear the picture is too highly glazed.  In this room also is the famous picture of Belisarius, engraved with so much eclat by Desnoyers.  I own that I like the engraving better than the painting; for I see no occasion for such a disproportionate quantity of warm colouring as this picture exhibits.

Pope (in his Epistle to Jarvis, I think) says of artists, that, “to paint the naked is their dear delight.”  No artists ever delighted so much in this branch of painting as the French.  Does not this taste argue a want—­not only of respect, but—­of feeling? It was therefore pleasing to me, my dear friend, to turn my attention from the studied display of naked goddesses, in the collection of the worthy Marquis of Sommariva, towards objects a little more qualified to gratify the higher feelings connected with art:—­and the first thing which soothed me, when I had so turned my attention, was, the Terpsichore of Canova.  You know it from the print by Morghen.  The countenance, to my eye, is the perfection of female beauty:—­yet it is a countenance which seems to be the abstract—­the result of study, and of combination—­rather than of beauty, as seen “in mortal race which walks the earth.”  The drapery appears to be studiously neglected—­giving it the appearance of the antique, which had been battered and bruised by the casualties of some two thousand years.  By this, I mean that the folds are not only numerous, but the intermediate parts are not marked by that degree of precision and finish, which, in my opinion, they ought to have received.  Yet the whole has an enchantingly simple air:  at once classical, pure, and impressive.  The Marquis has indeed great reason to be proud of it.