either a vain confidence or a
sluggish despair, both equally fatal to all proficiency.

'Study, therefore, the great masters for ever: study nature attentively,
but always with those masters in your company; consider them as models
which you are to imitate, and, at the same time, as _rivals_ with whom
you are to contend;' and you will insensibly come to feel and reason
like them, and find taste imperceptibly formed in _your own mind_.

By the industry of the hand you will acquire good manner, but it is to
the industry of the mind you will be indebted for any solid reputation.

'He who does not know others, knows himself very imperfectly.'

_Wrongly directed_ industry is a dangerous delusion. Too much copying
will, on the other hand, greatly tend to impair our mental exertions,
render them servile and mechanical, and confine, at the most, our
aspirings to a very limited sphere, while it is utterly at variance in
establishing any claim of our own to originality or distinction.
Studying the _genius_ of a fine work of art, its _general_ forms, its
combinations, its chiaroscuro, its colour and effect; and with all these
on our minds, going home and making a companion to it, is a noble and
lofty aim, frequently attended with entire success. This excellent
practice, diligently persevered in, at length brings our sympathies
into a corresponding train of ideas with those we would emulate; and if
we cannot reach them in their various excellencies, so we succeed in
lighting our torch at those glorious beams of old, our advances are at
least entitled to that respect they universally meet with. An abject
imitation is of all things that I should avoid. But that _reading of_,
and conversing with a picture, that almost places us under a delusion,
during the time we are under its influence; that associating our
feelings and ideas--that blending of our aspirations with the master
mind that thought and wrought so well, is the surest hemisphere in which
we can hope to think and paint like them. The student's perceptions
become annealed by the influence of the charm that invests him: he
aspires to a higher latitude of excellence: he beholds before him the
ripest fruit on the topmost palm, and he knows the principles and the
laws by which he _can_ reach it, and _does_ reach it, by the agency of,
and the gradual developement of the simple rules he commenced with.

It often happens, and it is my opinion, that a careless scribbler, who
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