s been carried on much further, I must have
thrown aside the work in despair." He took the greatest pains in long
and laboriously preparing himself by reading. "To form a storehouse, as
it were, of illustrations purely Oriental, and so familiarize myself
with its various treasures that, quick as Fancy required the aid of
fact in her spiritings, the memory was ready to furnish materials for
the spell-work; such was, for a long while, the sole object of my
studies." After quoting some opinions favorable to the truth of his
Oriental coloring, he says: "Whatever of vanity there may be in citing
such tributes, they show, at least, of what great value, even in poetry,
is that prosaic quality, industry, since it was in a slow and laborious
collection of small facts that the first foundations of this fanciful
romance were laid."

Other fine arts make equally large claims upon the industry of their
professors. We see the charming result, which looks as if it were
nothing but pleasure--the mere sensuous gratification of an appetite for
melody or color; but no one ever eminently succeeded in music or
painting without patient submission to a discipline far from attractive
or entertaining. An idea was very prevalent amongst the upper classes in
England, between twenty and thirty years ago, that art was not a serious
pursuit, and that Frenchmen were too frivolous to apply themselves
seriously to anything. When, however, the different schools of art in
Europe came to be exhibited together, the truth began to dawn upon
people's minds that the French and Belgian schools of painting had a
certain superiority over the rest--a superiority of quite a peculiar
sort; and when the critics applied themselves to discover the hidden
causes of this generally perceived superiority, they found out that it
was due in great measure to the patient drudgery submitted to by those
foreign artists in their youth. English painters who have attained
distinction have gone through a like drudgery, if not in the public
_atelier_ at least in secrecy and solitude. Mr. John Lewis, in reply to
an application for a drawing to be reproduced by the autotype process,
and published in the _Portfolio_, said that his sketches and studies
were all in color, but if we liked to examine them we were welcome to
select anything that might be successfully photographed. Not being in
London at the time, I charged an experienced friend to go and see if
there were anything that woul