tation, to
give you a motive for fidelity in handwork more animating than any
connected with mere success in the art itself.

26. With respect to actual methods of practice, I will not incur the
responsibility of determining them for you. We will take Lionardo's
treatise on painting for our first text-book; and I think you need not
fear being misled by me if I ask you to do only what Lionardo bids, or
what will be necessary to enable you to do his bidding. But you need not
possess the book, nor read it through. I will translate the pieces to
the authority of which I shall appeal; and, in process of time, by
analysis of this fragmentary treatise, show you some characters not
usually understood of the simplicity as well as subtlety common to most
great workmen of that age. Afterwards we will collect the instructions
of other undisputed masters, till we have obtained a code of laws
clearly resting on the consent of antiquity.

While, however, I thus in some measure limit for the present the methods
of your practice, I shall endeavour to make the courses of my University
lectures as wide in their range as my knowledge will permit. The range
so conceded will be narrow enough; but I believe that my proper function
is not to acquaint you with the general history, but with the essential
principles of art; and with its history only when it has been both great
and good, or where some special excellence of it requires examination of
the causes to which it must be ascribed.

27. But if either our work, or our enquiries, are to be indeed
successful in their own field, they must be connected with others of a
sterner character. Now listen to me, if I have in these past details
lost or burdened your attention; for this is what I have chiefly to say
to you. The art of any country is _the exponent of its social and
political virtues_. I will show you that it is so in some detail, in the
second of my subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this as one
of the things, and the most important of all things, I can positively
declare to you. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of
any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have
noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their
time and circumstances. And the best skill that any teacher of art could
spend here in your help, would not end in enabling you even so much as
rightly to draw the water-lilies in the Cherwell (and th