Have you tried, my dear sir--you who set up to be
a connoisseur? Have you tried? I have--and many a day. And the end of
the day's labor? O dismal conclusion! Is this puerile niggling, this
feeble scrawl, this impotent rubbish, all you can produce--you, who
but now found Rubens commonplace and vulgar, and were pointing out the
tricks of his mystery? Pardon, O great chief, magnificent master and
poet! You can DO. We critics, who sneer and are wise, can but pry, and
measure, and doubt, and carp. Look at the lion. Did you ever see such
a gross, shaggy, mangy, roaring brute? Look at him eating lumps of raw
meat--positively bleeding, and raw and tough--till, faugh! it turns
one's stomach to see him--O the coarse wretch! Yes, but he is a lion.
Rubens has lifted his great hand, and the mark he has made has endured
for two centuries, and we still continue wondering at him, and admiring
him. What a strength in that arm! What splendor of will hidden behind
that tawny beard, and those honest eyes! Sharpen your pen, my good
critic, shoot a feather into him; hit him, and make him wince. Yes, you
may hit him fair, and make him bleed, too; but, for all that, he is a
lion--a mighty, conquering, generous, rampageous Leo Belgicus--monarch
of his wood.
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