habitual intercourse, to the end of our lives, with good and great
examples, will invest our own inventions with their splendid qualities;
and if we do not imitate others, we shall soon be found imitating
ourselves, 'and repeating what we have before often repeated; while he
who has treasured the most materials, has the greatest means of
invention.'

It by no means appears to me impossible to overtake what we admire and
imitate--or even to pass it. He 'has only had the advantage of starting
before you,' while pointing the way has shortened our own labour. Life
must henceforth become longer; because we now, more than ever, gain time
by the experience of others: we pass on from that to our own, until
every thing in nature, judiciously directed, becomes subservient to the
principles and purposes of Art.

Again, 'I very much doubt,' says Sir Joshua, 'whether a habit of drawing
correctly what we _see_ will not give a proportionable power of drawing
correctly what we imagine.' But practice must always be founded on good
Theory; for mere correctness of drawing is, perhaps, nearly allied to
mechanical; blending it with the imaginative alone, in composition,
constitutes its pretensions to genius; but confidence in the one
produces boldness in the other.

'All rules arise from the passions and affections of the mind, and to
which they are all referrible. Art effects its purposes by their means.'

'Years,' says a modern author, 'are often spent in acquiring wealth,
which eventually cannot be enjoyed for want of those stores of the mind,
that should have been laid up in youth, as the best solace of declining
age. The most moderate power of making a sketch from nature would have
been a valuable attainment, when leisure and opportunity threw them
among scenes they could but half enjoy in consequence.' Besides, true
Taste does every thing in the best way at the least expense, while the
want of it often appears in unmeaning decoration at a vast outlay.

'A man of polite imagination,' says Addison, 'feels greater satisfaction
in the prospect of fields and meadows than another does in the
possession of them: it gives him a kind of property in every thing he
sees; so that he looks on the world, as it were, in another light.'

When a Painter walks out, he receives at every glance impressions that
would entirely escape others, upon sensibilities refined by habits of
observation The art of seeing things as they appear is the art of
acq