student should be at all capable of such an acquisition. Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.”—Ibid. p. 57.
Here then Sir Joshua admits that it is a question whether the student is likely to be at all capable of such an acquisition as the higher excellencies of art, though he had said in the passage just quoted above that it is within the reach of constant assiduity and of a disposition eagerly directed to the object of its pursuit to effect all that is usually considered as the result of natural powers. Is the theory which our author means to inculcate a mere delusion, a mere arbitrary assumption? At one moment Sir Joshua attributes the hopelessness of the student to attain perfection to the discouraging influence of certain figurative and overstrained expressions, and in the next doubts his capacity for such an acquisition under any circumstances. Would he have him hope against hope, then? If he “examines his own mind and finds nothing there of that divine inspiration with which he is told so many others have been favoured,” but which he has never felt himself; if “he finds himself possessed of no other qualifications” for the highest efforts of genius and imagination “than what mere com-
