d answer our purpose. Soon afterward he
wrote: "I have just been to see John Lewis, and have come away
_astounded_." He had seen the vast foundations of private industry on
which the artist's public work had been erected,--innumerable studies in
color, wrought with the most perfect care and finish, and all for
self-education merely, not for any direct reward in fame. We have all
admired the extraordinary power of representation in the little pictures
of Meissonier; that power was acquired by painting studies _life-size_
for self-instruction, and the artist has sustained his knowledge by
persistence in that practice. Mulready, between the conception of a new
picture and the execution of it, used to give himself a special training
for the intended work by painting a study in color of every separate
thing that was to form part of the composition. It is useless to go on
multiplying these examples, since all great artists, without exception,
have been distinguished for their firm faith in steady well-directed
labor. This faith was so strong in Reynolds that it limited his
reasoning powers, and prevented him from assigning their due importance
to the inborn natural gifts.

Not only in their preparations for work, but even in the work itself, do
artists undergo drudgery. It is the peculiarity of their work that, more
than any other human work, it displays whatever there may be in it of
pleasure and felicity, putting the drudgery as much out of sight as
possible; but all who know the secrets of the studio are aware of the
ceaseless struggles against technical difficulty which are the price of
the charms that pleasantly deceive us. The amateur tries to paint in
water-color, and finds that the gradation of his sky will not come
right; instead of being a sound gradation like that of the heavenly
blue, it is all in spots and patches. Then he goes to some clever artist
who seems to get the right thing with enviable ease. "Is my paper good?
have my colors been properly ground?" The materials are sound enough,
but the artist confesses one of the discouraging little secrets of his
craft. "The fact is," he says, "those spots that you complain of happen
to all of us, and very troublesome they are, especially in dark tints;
the only way is to remove them as patiently as we can, and it sometimes
takes several days. If one or two of them remain in spite of us, we
turn them into birds." In etching, the most famous practitioners get
into mess