selfishly). But in such writings and sayings as we possess
of theirs we may trace a quite curious gentleness and serene courtesy.
Rubens's letters are almost ludicrous in their unhurried politeness.
Reynolds, swiftest of painters, was gentlest of companions; so also
Velasquez, Titian, and Veronese.

"It is gratuitous to add that no shallow or petty person can paint. Mere
cleverness or special gift never made an artist. It is only perfectness
of mind, unity, depth, decision, the highest qualities, in fine, of the
intellect, which will form the imagination.

"And, lastly, no false person can paint. A person false at heart may,
when it suits his purposes, seize a stray truth here or there; but the
relations of truth, its perfectness, that which makes it wholesome
truth, he can never perceive. As wholeness and wholesomeness go
together, so also sight with sincerity; it is only the constant desire
of and submissiveness to truth, which can measure its strange angles
and mark its infinite aspects, and fit them and knit them into sacred
invention.

"Sacred I call it deliberately; for it is thus in the most accurate
senses, humble as well as helpful,--meek in its receiving as magnificent
in its disposing; the name it bears being rightly given even to
invention formal, not because it forms, but because it finds. For you
cannot find a lie; you must make it for yourself. False things may be
imagined, and false things composed; but only truth can be invented."

One of those cardinal doctrines by which we may learn the bearings of a
writer's system of truth is that of Ruskin's of the intimate connection
between landscape art and humanity.

"Fragrant tissue of flowers, golden circlet of clouds, are only fair
when they meet the fondness of human thoughts and glorify human visions
of heaven.

"It is the leaning on this truth which more than any other has been the
distinctive character of all my own past work. And in closing a series
of art-studies, prolonged during so many years, it may be perhaps
permitted me to point out this specialty,--the rather that it has been,
of all their characters, the one most denied. I constantly see that the
same thing takes place in the estimation formed by the modern public of
the work of almost any true person, living or dead. It is not needful
to state here the causes of such error; but the fact is indeed so, that
precisely the distinctive root and leading force of any true man's work
and way ar