es it,

"To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,"

may be an after consideration, when the pupils become masters themselves.
It is then, when their genius has received its utmost improvement, that
rules may possibly be dispensed with. But let us not destroy the
scaffold until we have raised the building.

The directors ought more particularly to watch over the genius of those
students who, being more advanced, are arrived at that critical period of
study, on the nice management of which their future turn of taste
depends. At that age it is natural for them to be more captivated with
what is brilliant than with what is solid, and to prefer splendid
negligence to painful and humiliating exactness.

A facility in composing, a lively, and what is called a masterly handling
the chalk or pencil, are, it must be confessed, captivating qualities to
young minds, and become of course the objects of their ambition. They
endeavour to imitate those dazzling excellences, which they will find no
great labour in attaining. After much time spent in these frivolous
pursuits, the difficulty will be to retreat; but it will be then too
late; and there is scarce an instance of return to scrupulous labour
after the mind has been debauched and deceived by this fallacious
mastery.

By this useless industry they are excluded from all power of advancing in
real excellence. Whilst boys, they are arrived at their utmost
perfection; they have taken the shadow for the substance; and make that
mechanical facility the chief excellence of the art, which is only an
ornament, and of the merit of which few but painters themselves are
judges.

This seems to me to be one of the most dangerous sources of corruption;
and I speak of it from experience, not as an error which may possibly
happen, but which has actually infected all foreign academies. The
directors were probably pleased with this premature dexterity in their
pupils, and praised their despatch at the expense of their correctness.

But young men have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought
masterly inciting them on one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting
them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of
the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is
distrusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from
mere impatience of labour, to take the citadel by storm. They wish to
find some shorter path to excel