The lovers of beauty, preferring what is dull to what is offensive, will rather doze over the inanities and insipidities of a drowsy dilettantism, than choose to be irritated into wakeful attention by ugly contours, disproportioned figures, and ill-assorted colours, drawn and arranged after the hard and ignorant manner of the early Christian painters, and imbued with the childish symbolism of the dismal Middle Ages.