eglect to aid, these efforts
at self-culture? or shall we encourage and guide them as normal
exercises of the perceptions and the powers of manipulation? If by
furnishing cheap woodcuts to be painted, and simple contour-maps to have
their boundary lines tinted, we can not only pleasurably draw out the
faculty of colour, but can incidentally produce some familiarity with
the outlines of things and countries, and some ability to move the brush
steadily; and if by the supply of tempting objects we can keep up the
instinctive practice of making representations, however rough; it must
happen that when the age for lessons in drawing is reached, there will
exist a facility that would else have been absent. Time will have been
gained; and trouble, both to teacher and pupil, saved.

From what has been said, it may be readily inferred that we condemn the
practice of drawing from copies; and still more so that formal
discipline in making straight lines and curved lines and compound lines,
with which it is the fashion of some teachers to begin. We regret that
the Society of Arts has recently, in its series of manuals on
"Rudimentary Art Instruction," given its countenance to an elementary
drawing-book, which is the most vicious in principle that we have seen.
We refer to the _Outline from Outline, or from the Flat_, by John Bell,
sculptor. As explained in the prefatory note, this publication proposes
"to place before the student a simple, yet logical mode of instruction;"
and to this end sets out with a number of definitions thus:--

"A simple line in drawing is a thin mark drawn from one point to
another.

"Lines may be divided, as to their nature in drawing, into two
classes:--

"1. _Straight_, which are marks that go the shortest road between
two points, as A B.

"2. Or _Curved_, which are marks which do not go the shortest road
between two points, as C D."

And so the introduction progresses to horizontal lines, perpendicular
lines, oblique lines, angles of the several kinds, and the various
figures which lines and angles make up. The work is, in short, a grammar
of form, with exercises. And thus the system of commencing with a dry
analysis of elements, which, in the teaching of language, has been
exploded, is to be re-instituted in the teaching of drawing. We are to
set out with the definite, instead of with the indefinite. The abstract
is to be preliminary to the concrete. Scient