les of the filling of ornamental forms with
flat colour in Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic design; and then we will
advance to animal forms treated in the same severe way, and so to the
patterns and colour designs on animals themselves. And when we are sure
of our firmness of hand and accuracy of eye, we will go on into light
and shade.

189. In process of time, this series of exercises will, I hope, be
sufficiently complete and systematic to show its purpose at a glance.
But during the present year, I shall content myself with placing a few
examples of these different kinds of practice in your rooms for work,
explaining in the catalogue the position they will ultimately occupy,
and the technical points of process into which it is useless to enter in
a general lecture. After a little time spent in copying these, your own
predilections must determine your future course of study; only remember,
whatever school you follow, it must be only to learn method, not to
imitate result, and to acquaint yourself with the minds of other men,
but not to adopt them as your own. Be assured that no good can come of
our work but as it arises simply out of our own true natures, and the
necessities of the time around us, though in many respects an evil one.
We live in an age of base conceit and baser servility--an age whose
intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, and occupied in desecration; one
day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of all the noble persons
who made its intellectual or art life possible to it:--an age without
honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an
original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system,
if it were allowed to meddle with it.[15] In the midst of all this, you
have to become lowly and strong; to recognise the powers of others and
to fulfil your own. I shall try to bring before you every form of
ancient art, that you may read and profit by it, not imitate it. You
shall draw Egyptian kings dressed in colours like the rainbow, and Doric
gods, and Runic monsters, and Gothic monks--not that you may draw like
Egyptians or Norsemen, nor yield yourselves passively to be bound by the
devotion, or inspired by the passion of the past, but that you may know
truly what other men have felt during their poor span of life; and open
your own hearts to what the heavens and earth may have to tell you in
yours.

[Footnote 15: Every day these bitter words become more sorrowfully tru