y's nose.
At a girls' school we might perhaps take refuge in rosebuds: but these
boys, with their impatient battle-cry, "my kingdom for a horse," what is
to be done for them?

42. Well, this is what I should like to be able to do for them. To show
them an enlarged black outline, nobly done, of the two sides of a coin
of Tarentum, with that fiery rider kneeling, careless, on his horse's
neck, and reclined on his surging dolphin, with the curled sea lapping
round them; and then to convince my boys that no one (unless it were
Taras's father himself, with the middle prong of his trident) could draw
a horse like that, without learning;--that for poor mortals like us
there must be sorrowful preparatory stages; and, having convinced them
of this, set them to draw (if I had a good copy to give them) a horse's
hoof, or his rib, or a vertebra of his thunder-clothed neck, or any
other constructive piece of him.

43. Meanwhile, all this being far out of present reach, I am fain to
shrink back into my snail-shell, both for shelter and calm of peace; and
ask of artists in general how the said shell, or any other simple object
involving varied contour, _should_ be outlined in ink?--how thick the
lines should be, and how varied? My own idea of an elementary outline is
that it should be unvaried; distinctly visible; not thickened towards
the shaded sides of the object; not express any exaggerations of aerial
perspective, nor fade at the further side of a cup as if it were the
further side of a crater of a volcano; and therefore, in objects of
ordinary size, show no gradation at all, unless where the real outline
disappears, as in soft contours and folds. Nay, I think it may even be a
question whether we ought not to resolve that the line should never
gradate itself at all, but terminate quite bluntly! Albert Duerer's
"Cannon" furnishes a very peculiar and curious example of this entirely
equal line, even to the extreme distance; being in that respect opposed
to nearly all his other work, which is wrought mostly by tapering lines;
and his work in general, and Holbein's, which appear to me entirely
typical of rightness in use of the graver and pen, are to be considered
carefully in their relation to Rembrandt's loose etching, as in the
"Spotted Shell."

44. But I do not want to press my own opinions now, even when I have
been able to form them distinctly. I want to get at some unanimous
expression of opinion and method; and would propo