e foregoing discussion of painters' methods has all been written
to draw a comparison and emphasise a contrast.

A contrast from which you, student of stained-glass, I hope may learn
much.

For as we have tried to describe the methods of the painter in oil or
water colours, and so point out his advantages and disadvantages, so we
would now draw a picture of the glass-painter at work; if he works as he
should do.

For the painter of pictures (we said) has his colour-box of a few
pigments, from which all his harmonies must come by mixing them and
diluting them in various proportions, dealing with infinity out of a
very limited range of materials, and required to supply all the rest by
his own skill and memory.

Coming each day to his work with his palette clean and his colours in
their tubes;

Beginning, as it were, all over again each time; and perhaps with his
heart cold and his memory dull.

But the glass-painter has his specimens of glass round him; some
hundreds, perhaps, of all possible tints.

He has, with these, to compose a subject in colour;

There is no getting out of it or shirking it;

He places the bits side by side, with no possibility (which the palette
gives) of slurring or diluting or dulling them; he must choose from the
clear hard tints;

And he has the whole problem before him;

He removes one and substitutes another;

"This looks better;" "That is a pleasant harmony;" "Ah! but this makes
it sing!"

He gets them into groups, and combines them into harmonies, tint with
tint, group with group:

If he is wise he has them always by him;

Always ready to arrange in a movable frame against the window;

He cuts little bits of each; he waxes them, or gums them, into groups on
sheets of glass;

He tries all his effects in the glass itself; he sketches in glass.

If he is wise he does this side by side with his water-colour sketch,
making each help the other, and thinking in glass; even perhaps making
his water-colour sketch afterwards from the glass.

Is it not reasonable?

Is it not far more easy, less dangerous?

He has not to rake in his cold and meagre memory to fish out some poor
handful of all the possible harmonies;

To repeat himself over and over again.

He has all the colours burning round him; singing to him to use them;
sounding all their chords.

Is it not the way? Is it not common sense?

Tints! pure tints! What great things they are.

I remember an old joke of