y, that a lover of soundness in
accomplishment will never rest perfectly satisfied until he speaks like
a cultivated native, which nobody ever did except under peculiar family
conditions.

In music the limits are found more easily. The amateur musician is
frequently not inferior in feeling and taste to the more accomplished
professional, and by selecting those compositions which require much
feeling and taste for their interpretation, but not so much manual
skill, he may reach a sufficient success. The art is to choose the very
simplest music (provided of course that it is beautiful, which it
frequently is), and to avoid all technical difficulties which are not
really necessary to the expression of feeling. The amateur ought also to
select the easiest instrument, an instrument in which the notes are made
for him already, rather than one which compels him to fix the notes as
he is playing. The violin tempts amateurs who have a deep feeling for
music because it renders feeling as no other instrument can render it,
but the difficulty of just intonation is almost insuperable unless the
whole time is given to that one instrument. It is a fatal error to
perform on several different instruments, and an amateur who has done so
may find a desirable limitation in restricting himself to one.

Much time is saved by following pursuits which help each other. It is a
great help to a landscape painter to know the botany of the country he
works in, for botany gives the greatest possible distinctness to his
memory of all kinds of vegetation. Therefore, if a landscape painter
takes to the study of science at all, he would do well to study botany,
which would be of use in his painting, rather than chemistry or
mathematics, which would be entirely disconnected from it. The memory
easily retains the studies which are auxiliary to the chief pursuit.
Entomologists remember plants well, the reason being that they find
insects in them, just as Leslie the painter had an excellent memory for
houses where there were any good pictures to be found.

The secret of order and proportion in our studies is the true secret of
economy in time. To have one main pursuit and several auxiliaries, but
none that are not auxiliary, is the true principle of arrangement. Many
hard workers have followed pursuits as widely disconnected as possible,
but this was for the refreshment of absolute change, not for the
economy of time.

Lastly, it is a deplorable waste o