correct, if he will, his own errors. You will have positive lines to
draw, presenting no more difficulty, except in requiring greater
steadiness of hand, than the outlines of a map. They will be generally
sweeping and simple, instead of being jagged into promontories and bays;
but assuredly, they may be drawn rightly (with patience), and their
rightness tested with mathematical accuracy. You have only to follow
your own line with tracing paper, and apply it to your own copy. If they
do not correspond, you are wrong, and you need no master to show you
where. Again; in washing in a flat tone of colour or shade, you can
always see yourself if it is flat, and kept well within the edges; and
you can set a piece of your colour side by side with that of the copy;
if it does not match, you are wrong; and, again, you need no one to tell
you so, if your eye for colour is true. It happens, indeed, more
frequently than would be supposed, that there is real want of power in
the eye to distinguish colours; and this I even suspect to be a
condition which has been sometimes attendant on high degrees of cerebral
sensitiveness in other directions; but such want of faculty would be
detected in your first two or three exercises by this simple method,
while, otherwise, you might go on for years endeavouring to colour from
nature in vain. Lastly, and this is a very weighty collateral reason,
such a method enables me to show you many things, besides the art of
drawing. Every exercise that I prepare for you will be either a portion
of some important example of ancient art, or of some natural object.
However rudely or unsuccessfully you may draw it, (though I anticipate
from you neither want of care nor success,) you will nevertheless have
learned what no words could have so forcibly or completely taught you,
either respecting early art or organic structure; and I am thus certain
that not a moment you spend attentively will be altogether wasted, and
that, generally, you will be twice gainers by every effort.

141. There is, however, yet another point in which I think a change of
existing methods will be advisable. You have here in Oxford one of the
finest collections in Europe of drawings in pen, and chalk, by Michael
Angelo and Raphael. Of the whole number, you cannot but have noticed
that not one is weak or student-like--all are evidently master's work.

You may look the galleries of Europe through, and so far as I know, or
as it is possib