The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Volume 1

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T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the strand, 1809

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Pagina lxxviii - Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind, He has not left a wiser or better behind : His pencil was striking, resistless, and grand : His manners were gentle, complying, and bland ; Still born to improve us in every part, His pencil our faces, his manners our heart...
Pagina xcii - Of men, by laws less circumscribed and bound ; They led their wild desires to woods and caves, And thought that all but savages were slaves.
Pagina 101 - I am persuaded, that scarce a poet is to be found, from Homer down to Dry den, who preserved a sound mind in a sound body, and continued practising his profession to the very last, whose latter works are not as replete with the fire of imagination, as those which were produced in his more youthful days.
Pagina 77 - Unsubstantial, however, as these rules may seem, and difficult as it may be to convey them in writing, they are still seen and felt in the mind of the artist; and he works from them with as much certainty as if they were embodied, as I may say, upon paper.
Pagina cix - Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmony of colouring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned ages.
Pagina 53 - Michael Angelo's works have a strong, peculiar, and marked character: they seem to proceed from his own mind entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant, that he never needed, or seemed to disdain, to look abroad for foreign help. Raphael's materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure is his own.
Pagina xv - It is much to be regretted that he did not live to compose such a Discourse ; for, from the hand of so great and candid an Artist, it could not but have been highly curious and instructive.
Pagina xviii - I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed. All the indigested notions of painting which I had brought with me from England, where the art was in the lowest state it had ever been in, (it could not indeed be lower,) were to be totally done away, and eradicated from my mind.
Pagina 101 - We will allow a poet to express his meaning, when his meaning is not well known to himself, with a certain degree of obscurity, as it is one source of the sublime. But when, in plain prose, we gravely talk of courting the Muse in shady bowers; waiting the call and inspiration of genius, finding out where he inhabits, and where he is to be invoked with the greatest success...
Pagina xxxii - No man had, like him, the faculty of teaching inferior minds the art of thinking. Perhaps other men might have equal knowledge; but few were so communicative. His great pleasure was, to talk to those who looked up to him.