at of pictorial expression of thought be not worth some toil; or
whether it is likely, in the natural order of matters in this working
world, that so great a gift should be attainable by those who will give
no price for it.

One task, however, of some difficulty, the student will find I have not
imposed upon him: namely, learning the laws of perspective. It would be
worth while to learn them, if he could do so easily; but without a
master's help, and in the way perspective is at present explained in
treatises, the difficulty is greater than the gain. For perspective is
not of the slightest use, except in rudimentary work. You can draw the
rounding line of a table in perspective, but you cannot draw the sweep
of a sea bay; you can foreshorten a log of wood by it, but you cannot
foreshorten an arm. Its laws are too gross and few to be applied to any
subtle form; therefore, as you must learn to draw the subtle forms by
the eye, certainly you may draw the simple ones. No great painters ever
trouble themselves about perspective, and very few of them know its
laws; they draw everything by the eye, and, naturally enough, disdain in
the easy parts of their work rules which cannot help them in difficult
ones. It would take about a month's labour to draw imperfectly, by laws
of perspective, what any great Venetian will draw perfectly in five
minutes, when he is throwing a wreath of leaves round a head, or bending
the curves of a pattern in and out among the folds of drapery. It is
true that when perspective was first discovered, everybody amused
themselves with it; and all the great painters put fine saloons and
arcades behind their madonnas, merely to show that they could draw in
perspective: but even this was generally done by them only to catch the
public eye, and they disdained the perspective so much, that though they
took the greatest pains with the circlet of a crown, or the rim of a
crystal cup, in the heart of their picture, they would twist their
capitals of columns and towers of churches about in the background in
the most wanton way, wherever they liked the lines to go, provided only
they left just perspective enough to please the public. In modern days,
I doubt if any artist among us, except David Roberts, knows so much
perspective as would enable him to draw a Gothic arch to scale, at a
given angle and distance. Turner, though he was professor of perspective
to the Royal Academy, did not know what he professed, and n