eed find that, in any single light, it is quite easy to
arrange them at proper and serviceable distances, without cutting across
the heads or hands of the figures; but it is ten chances to one that you
can get them to do so, and still be level with each other, throughout a
number of lights side by side.

The best plan, I think, is to set them out on the side of the
cartoon-paper before you begin, but not so as to notice them; then first
roughly strike out the position your most important groups or figures
are to occupy, and, before you go on with the serious work of drawing,
see if the bars cut awkwardly, and, if they do, whether a slight
shifting of them will clear all the important parts; it often will, and
then all is well; but I do not shrink from slightly altering even the
position of a head or hand, rather than give a laboured look to what
ought to be simple and straightforward by "coaxing" the bars up and down
all over the window to fit in with the numerous heads and hands.

If, by the way, I see fit in any case to adopt the other plan, and make
my composition first, placing the bars afterwards to suit it, I never
allow myself to shift them from the level that is convenient and
reasonable for anything _except_ a head; I prefer even that they should
cut across a hand, for instance, rather than that they should be placed
at inconvenient intervals to avoid it.

The principle of observing your limitations is, I do not hesitate to
say, the most important, and far the most important, of all principles
guiding the worker in the right practising of any craft.

The next in importance to it is the right exercise of all legitimate
freedom _within_ those limitations. I place them in this order, because
it is better to stop short, by nine-tenths, of right liberty, than to
take one-tenth of wrong license. But by rights the two things should go
together, and, with the requisite skill and training to use them,
constitute indeed the whole of the practice of a craft.

Modern division of labour is much against both of these things, the
observance of which charms us so in the ancient Gothic Art of the Middle
Ages.

For, since those days, the craft has never been taught as a whole.
Reader! this book cannot teach it you--no book, can; but it can make
you--and it was written with the sole object of making you--_wish_ to be
taught it, and determine to be taught it, if you intend to practise
stained-glass work at all.

Modern sta