the freight of fishes which two persons in each were able to haul in. But what is requisite in art is not fact, but verisimilitude. That "truth is stranger than fiction" (meaning by truth, insulated fact) is no excuse for wild, lawless invention. The mind of the artist while at work is fixed on the expression, character, form, and ordonnance, or graduated composition, of the objects he designs to represent, with a view to the developement of the main idea of his subject. If this idea be efficiently worked out in the application of those pictorial elements to the objects which are most properly susceptible of them, viz. human figures, subordinate considerations are of little importance. To impute to Raffaelle an obvious oversight, in this case, were absurd: there are no blunders in the productions of such minds. He wished to indicate the surprising nature of the miracle, not by exhibiting the prodigious quantity of fishes taken, but by showing with what sentiments it impressed the persons who were present. He felt it to be necessary to the complete effect of his group, with this view, that the size of the boats should be contracted within the smallest limits consistent with probability; and as even the violation of the principle of probability was of less consequence than the attainment of

that object, he was justified in casting off all fear of passing, in some small degree, the boundary line between the probable and the improbable.