ing value for your money, but merely disputing
for victory in a contest of ostentation. And it is hardly possible to
spend your money in a worse or more wasteful way; for though you may not
be doing it for ostentation yourself, you are, by your pertinacity,
nourishing the ostentation of others; you meet them in their game of
wealth, and continue it for them; if they had not found an opposite
player, the game would have been done; for a proud man can find no
enjoyment in possessing himself of what nobody disputes with him. So
that by every farthing you give for a picture beyond its fair
price--that is to say, the price which will pay the painter for his
time--you are not only cheating yourself and buying vanity, but you are
stimulating the vanity of others; paying, literally, for the cultivation
of pride. You may consider every pound that you spend above the just
price of a work of art, as an investment in a cargo of mental quick-lime
or guano, which, being laid on the fields of human nature, is to grow a
harvest of pride. You are in fact ploughing and harrowing, in a most
valuable part of your land, in order to reap the whirlwind; you are
setting your hand stoutly to Job's agriculture--"Let thistles grow
instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley."

102. Well, but you will say, there is one advantage in high prices,
which more than counter-balances all this mischief, namely, that by
great reward we both urge and enable a painter to produce rather one
perfect picture than many inferior ones: and one perfect picture (so you
tell us, and we believe it) is worth a great number of inferior ones.

It is so; but you cannot get it by paying for it. A great work is only
done when the painter gets into the humour for it, likes his subject,
and determines to paint it as well as he can, whether he is paid for it
or not; but bad work, and generally the worst sort of bad work, is done
when he is trying to produce a showy picture, or one that shall appear
to have as much labour in it as shall be worth a high price.[13]

[Note 13: When this lecture was delivered, I gave here some data for
approximate estimates of the average value of good modern pictures of
different classes; but the subject is too complicated to be adequately
treated in writing, without introducing more detail than the reader will
have patience for. But I may state, roughly, that prices above a hundred
guineas are in general extravagant for water-colours, and a