white
basin with the solution, and put anything you like to float on it, or
lie in it; walnut shells, bits of wood, leaves of flowers, &c. Then
study the effects of the reflections, and of the stems of the flowers or
submerged portions of the floating objects, as they appear through the
blue liquid; noting especially how, as you lower your head and look
along the surface, you see the reflections clearly; and how, as you
raise your head, you lose the reflections, and see the submerged stems
clearly.

[233] Respecting Architectural Drawing, see the notice of the works of
Prout in the Appendix.

LETTER III.

ON COLOUR AND COMPOSITION.

MY DEAR READER:--

If you have been obedient, and have hitherto done all that I have told
you, I trust it has not been without much subdued remonstrance, and some
serious vexation. For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the
course of your study to observe closely such things as are beautiful in
colour, you had not longed to paint them, and felt considerable
difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of black, or
blue, or grey. You _ought_ to love colour, and to think nothing quite
beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its
own sake, and are not merely desirous to colour because you think
painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may colour
well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than
pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in colour,
unless you mean to be wholly an artist. You may, in the time which other
vocations leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, and
masterly drawings in light and shade. But to colour well, requires your
life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is
increased--not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, and more--by
the addition of colour to your work. For the chances are more than a
thousand to one against your being right both in form and colour with a
given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend
to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much
more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely
increased--and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that,
while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any
line that it is either right or wrong, colour is wholly _relative_.
Every hue throughout your work is altere