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ANECDOTES of PAINTING, &c.
CHAP. I.
Painters and other Artists in the Reign of JAMES I.
IT was well for the arts that King James had no disposition to them: He let them take their own course. Had he felt any inclination for them, he would probably have introduced as bad a taste as he did into litterature. A Prince who thought puns and quibbles the per∣fection of eloquence, would have been charmed with the monkies of Hemskirk and the drunken boors of Ostade. James loved his ease and his pleasures and hated novelties. He gave himself up to hunting and hunted in the most cumbrous and inconvenient of all dresses, a ruff and trowser breeches. The nobility kept up the magnificence they found established by Queen Elizabeth, in which predominated a want of taste, rather than a bad one. In more ancient times the man∣sions of the great lords, were, as I have mentioned before, built for de∣fence and strength rather than convenience. The walls thick, the win∣dows pierced wherever it was most necessary for them to look abroad, instead of being contrived for symmetry or to illuminate the chambers. To that style succeeded the richness and delicacy of the Gothic. As this declined, before the Grecian taste was established, space and vast∣ness seem to have made their whole ideas of grandeur. The palaces