Genre:

Miscellaneous

Subjects:

Microscopy

    Denies that exact resemblance is the measure of quality in a portrait. The painter should not contemplate his subject 'through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the canvass the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdignagian maids of honour'. Moreover, if he did, 'a microscope of greater power than that which he had employed, would convict him of innumerable omissions'. (108)