LXIX

What do you mean--that you have been working, but without success? Do
you mean that you cannot get the price you ask? then sell it for less,
till, by practice, you shall improve, and command a better price. Or do
you only mean that you are not satisfied with your work? nobody ever was
that I know, except J---- W----. Peg away! While you're at work you must
be improving. Do something from Nature indoors when you cannot get out,
to keep your hand and eye in practice. Don't get into the way of working
too much at your drawings away from Nature.

_Charles Keene._


LXX

The purpose of art is no other than to delineate the form and express
the spirit of an object, animate or inanimate, as the case may be. The
use of art is to produce copies of things; and if an artist has a
thorough knowledge of the properties of the thing he paints he can
assuredly make a name. Just as a writer of profound erudition and good
memory has ever at his command an inexhaustible supply of words and
phrases which he freely makes use of in writing, so can a painter, who
has accumulated experience by drawing from nature, paint any object
without a conscious effort. The artist who confines himself to copying
from models painted by his master, fares no better than a literatus who
cannot rise above transcribing others' compositions. An ancient critic
says that writing ends in describing a thing or narrating an event, but
painting can represent the actual forms of things. Without the true