se in a cowardly manner, and without
confession: but the ink line, if it goes wrong at all, goes wrong with a
will, and may be convicted at our leisure, and put to such shame as its
black complexion is capable of. May we, therefore, begin with the hard
line? It will lead us far, if we can come to conclusions about it.

39. Presuming, then, that our schoolboys are such as Coleridge would
have them--_i.e._ that they are

"Innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies,"

and, above all, in a moral state in which they may be trusted with
ink--we put a pen into their hands (shall it be steel?) and a piece of
smooth white paper, and something before them to draw. But what? "Nay,"
the reader answers, "you had surely better give them pencil first, for
that may be rubbed out." Perhaps so; but I am not sure that the power of
rubbing out is an advantage; at all events, we shall best discover what
the pencil outline ought to be, by investigating the power of the black
one, and the kind of things we can draw with it.

40. Suppose, for instance, my first scholar has a turn for entomology,
and asks me to draw for him a wasp's leg, or its sting; having first
humanely provided me with a model by pulling one off or out. My pen must
clearly be fine at the point, and my execution none of the boldest, if I
comply with his request. If I decline, and he thereupon challenges me at
least to draw the wasp's body, with its pretty bands of black
crinoline--behold us involved instantly in the profound question of
local color! Am I to tell him he is not to draw outlines of bands or
spots? How, then, shall he know a wasp's body from a bee's? I escape,
for the present, by telling him the story of Daedalus and the honeycomb;
set him to draw a pattern of hexagons, and lay the question of black
bands up in my mind.

41. The next boy, we may suppose, is a conchologist, and asks me to draw
a white snail-shell for him! Veiling my consternation at the idea of
having to give a lesson on the perspective of geometrical spirals, with
an "austere regard of control" I pass on to the next student:--Who,
bringing after him, with acclamation, all the rest of the form,
requires of me contemptuously, to "draw a horse."

And I retreat in final discomfiture; for not only I cannot myself
execute, but I have never seen, an outline, quite simply and rightly
done, either of a shell or a pony; nay, not so much as of a pon