18
But all this, no doubt, is apart from the issue and has nothing to do with the case; and the charge to which I must answer is that in making my sketch of you I likened you in beauty to Cnidian Aphrodite and Our Lady in the Gardens and Hera and Athena. That seemed to you extravagant and presumptuous. I shall address myself precisely to that point.
18
It is an ancient saying, however, that poets and painters are not to be held accountable; Pictoribus atque poetis Quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas. Horace, Ars Poet. 9 sq. still less, I think, eulogists, even if they fare humbly afoot like me, instead of being borne on the wings of song. For praise is an unshackled thing, and has ESSAYS IN PORTRAITURE DEFENDED no limit, whether upper or lower, prescribed for it. The only object that it ever has in view is to excite high admiration and to maké its subject enviable. Nevertheless, I shall not take this course, for fear you may think that I do so for want of a better.
19
This, however, I do say; the conditions that govern us in these laudatory writings are such that the eulogist must employ comparisons and similes, and really the most important part of it is to make successful comparisons. And success would be most likely to be held attained, not if a man compares like to like, or if he makes his comparison with something that is inferior, but if he approximates, in so far as he may, what he is praising to something that surpasses it.
19
For example, if in praising a dog someone were to say that it was larger than a fox or a cat, does it seem to you that he knows how to praise? You will not say so! But even if he should say it was as large as a wolf, he has not praised it generously. Well, at what point will the special end of praise be achieved? When the dog is said to resemble a lion in size and in strength. So the poet who praised Orion’s dogPindar, frag. 74a (Schroeder). called him “lion-daunting.”’ That, of course, in the case of a dog is perfect praise.
