Several passages of my Essay are susceptible of explications, and, having been publickly tried by an anonymous author, should be explained and defended at the same time, if my circumstances would permit me to enlarge[107]. As to his other remarks, the author, I hope, will guess at my answer, without my giving one explicitly.—Indeed they do not require any.
I am not in the least moved by the clamours concerning those pieces of _Corregio_, which, by undoubted accounts, were not only brought to _Sweden_[108], but even hung up in the stables at _Stockholm_. Reasoning is of no use here: arguments of this kind admit of no other evidence but that of _Æmilius Scaurus_ against _Valerius_ of _Sucro_: “He denies; I affirm: Romans! ’tis yours to judge.”
And why should there be any thing more derogatory to the honour of the Swedes, in my repeating Count _Tessin_’s relation, than in his giving it? Perhaps, because the learned author of the circumstantial life of Queen _Christina_ omits her indiscreet generosity towards _Bourdon_, and that bad treatment which the pictures of _Corregio_ met with? or was _Härleman_[109] himself charged with indiscretion or malice, on his relating that, at _Lincöping_, he found a college, and seven professors, but not one physician or artificer?
It was my design to explain myself more particularly, concerning the negligences of the Greeks, had I been allowed time. The Greeks, as their criticism on the partridge of Protogenes, and his blotting it[110], evidently shews, were not ignorant in learned negligence. But the Zeus of Phidias was the standard of sublimity, the symbol of the omnipresent Deity; like Homer’s Eris, he stood upon the earth, and reached heaven; he was, in the style of sacred poesy, “_What encompasses him?_ &c.” And the world has been candid enough to excuse, nay, even to justify on such reasons, the disproportions in the Carton of Raphael, representing the fishing of Peter[111]. The criticism on the _Diomedes_, though solid, is not against me: his action, abstractedly considered, with his noble and expressive contour, are standards of the art; and that was all I advanced[112].
The reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks may be reduced to four heads, viz.