rness; he
follows her more humbly, and has produced to us more of her
simplicity; we feel his appeal to be more earnest: it is the crying
out of the man, with none of the strut of the actor.

Let us have the mind and the mind's-workings, not the remains of
earnest thought which has been frittered away by a long dreary course
of preparatory study, by which all life has been evaporated. Never
forget that there is in the wide river of nature something which
every body who has a rod and line may catch, precious things which
every one may dive for.

It need not be feared that this course of education would lead to a
repetition of the toe-trippings of the earliest Italian school, a
sneer which is manifestly unfair; for this error, as well as several
others of a similar kind, was not the result of blindness or
stupidity, but of the simple ignorance of what had not been applied
to the service of painting at their time. It cannot be shown that
they were incorrect in expression, false in drawing, or unnatural in
what is called composition. On the contrary, it is demonstrable that
they exceeded all others in these particulars, that they partook less
of coarseness and of conventional sentiment than any school which
succeeded them, and that they looked more to nature; in fact, were
more true, and less artificial. That their subjects were generally of
a melancholy cast is acknowledged, which was an accident resulting
from the positions their pictures were destined to occupy. No man
ever complained that the Scriptures were morbid in their tendency
because they treat of serious and earnest subjects: then why of the
pictures which represent such? A certain gaunt length and slenderness
have also been commented upon most severely; as if the Italians of
the fourteenth century were as so many dray horses, and the artist
were blamed for not following his model. The consequence of this
direction of taste is that we have life-guardsmen and pugilists taken
as models for kings, gentlemen, and philosophers. The writer was once
in a studio where a man, six feet two inches in height, with
atlantean shoulders, was sitting for King Alfred. That there is no
greater absurdity than this will be perceived by any one that has
ever read the description of the person of the king given by his
historian and friend Asser.

The sciences have become almost exact within the present century.
Geology and chemistry are almost re-instituted. The first has been
n