this making it to please ourselves, while we are incapable
of pleasure. Take, for instance, the simplest example, which we can all
understand, in the art of dress. We have made a great fuss about the
patterns of silk lately; wanting to vie with Lyons, and make a Paris of
London. Well, we may try forever: so long as we don't really enjoy silk
patterns, we shall never get any. And we don't enjoy them. Of course,
all ladies like their dresses to sit well, and be becoming; but of real
enjoyment of the beauty of the silk, for the silk's own sake, I find
none; for the test of that enjoyment is, that they would like it also to
sit well, and look well, on somebody else. The pleasure of being well
dressed, or even of seeing well-dressed people--for I will suppose in my
fair hearers that degree of unselfishness--be that pleasure great or
small, is quite a different thing from delight in the beauty and play of
the silken folds and colors themselves, for their own gorgeousness or
grace.

10. I have just had a remarkable proof of the total want of this feeling
in the modern mind. I was staying part of this summer in Turin, for the
purpose of studying one of the Paul Veroneses there--the presentation of
the Queen of Sheba to Solomon. Well, one of the most notable characters
in this picture is the splendor of its silken dresses: and, in
particular, there was a piece of white brocade, with designs upon it in
gold, which it was one of my chief objects in stopping at Turin to copy.
You may, perhaps, be surprised at this; but I must just note in passing,
that I share this weakness of enjoying dress patterns with all good
students and all good painters. It doesn't matter what school they
belong to,--Fra Angelico, Perugino, John Bellini, Giorgione, Titian,
Tintoret, Veronese, Leonardo da Vinci--no matter how they differ in
other respects, all of them like dress patterns; and what is more, the
nobler the painter is, the surer he is to do his patterns well.

11. I stayed then, as I say, to make a study of this white brocade. It
generally happens in public galleries that the best pictures are the
worst placed; and this Veronese is not only hung at considerable height
above the eye, but over a door, through which, however, as all the
visitors to the gallery must pass, they cannot easily overlook the
picture, though they would find great difficulty in examining it. Beside
this door, I had a stage erected for my work, which being of some height