And so Bellori informs us of a very curious volume in manuscript, composed by RUBENS, which contained, among other topics concerning art, descriptions of the passions and actions of men, drawn from the poets, and demonstrated to the eye by the painters.

Here were battles, shipwrecks, sports, groups, and other incidents, which were transcribed from Virgil and other poets, and by their side RUBENS had copied what he had met with on those subjects from Raphael and the antique.[A] The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest.

This old family-quarrel for precedence was renewed by our estimable President, in his brilliant "Rhymes on Art;" where he maintains that "the narrative of an action is not comparable to the action itself before the eyes;" while the enthusiast BARRY considers painting "as poetry realised."[B] This error of genius, perhaps first caught from Richardson's bewildering pages, was strengthened by the extravagant principle adopted by Darwin, who, to exalt his solitary talent of descriptive poetry, asserted that "the essence of poetry was picture." The philosophical critic will find no difficulty in assigning to each, sister-art her distinct province; and it is only a pleasing delirium, in the enthusiasm of artists, which has confused the boundaries of these arts.

The dread pathetic story of Dante's "Ugolino," under the plastic hand of Michael Angelo, formed the subject of a basso-relievo; and Reynolds, with his highest effort, embodied the terrific conception of the poet as much as his art permitted: but assuredly both these great artists would never have claimed the precedence of the Dantesc genius, and might have hesitated at the rivalry.
[Footnote A: Rubens was an ardent collector of works of antique art; and in the "Curiosities of Literature," vol.iii.p.

398, will be found an interesting account of his museum at Antwerp .-- ED.] [Footnote B: The late Sir Martin Archer Shee, P.R.A.This accomplished artist, who possessed a large amount of poetical and literary power, asks, "What is there of _intellectual_ in the operations of the poet which the painter does not equal?
What is there of _mechanical_ which he does not surpass?
The advantage which poetry possesses over painting in continued narration and successive impression, cannot be advanced as a peculiar merit of the poet, since it results from the nature of language, and is common to prose." Poetry he values as the earliest of arts, painting as the latest and most refined .-- ED.] Who has not heard of that one common principle which unites the intellectual arts, and who has not felt that the nature of their genius is similar in their distinct works?
Hence curious inquiries could never decide whether the group of the Laocooen in sculpture preceded or was borrowed from that in poetry.