Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON THE CATALOGUE RAISONNfi OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTION. We will lay any odds that this is a fellow " damned in a fair face;'' with white eyes and eyebrows; of the colour of a Shrewsbury cake; a smooth tallow-skinned rascal, a white German sausage, a well-fed chitterling, from whose face Madame de Stael would have turned away in disgust,— a transcendental stuffed man ! We have no patience that the arts should be catechised by a piece of whit-leather, a whey face, who thinks that pictures, like the moon, should be made of green cheese ! Shall a roll of double tripe rise up in judgment on grace; shall a piece of dough talk of feeling? 'Tis too much. 'Sdeath, for Rembrandt to be demanded of a cheese-curd, what replication should he make ? What might Vandyck answer to a jack-pudding, whose fingers are of a thickness at both ends i What should Rubens say, who " lived in the rainbow, and played i' th' plighted clouds," to a swaddling cloak, a piece of stockinet, of fleecy hosiery, to a squab man, without a bend in his body ? What might Raffaelle answer to a joint- stool.1 or Nicholas Poussin, charged in the presence of his " Cephalus and Aurora " with being a mere pedant, without grace or feeling, to this round-about machine of formal impertinence, this lumbering go-cart of dulness and spite ? We could have wished that as the fellow stood before the portrait of Rembrandt, chattering like an ape, making mocks and mows at it, the picture had lifted up its great grimy Just, and knocked him down. The " Catalogue Raisonne"" of the British Institution isonly worth notice, as it is pretty generally understood to be a declaration of the views of the Royal Academy. It is a very dull, gross, impudent attack by one of its toad-eaters on human genius, on permanent reputation, and on liberal art...