ttempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener in
cowardice than in disdain.

I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have not
space to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which would
follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission,
and to the whole people, in the results of his labor. Consider how the
man himself would be elevated: how content he would become, how earnest,
how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from
envy--knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what
he did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people;
the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy,
pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; the
far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupied
with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of
inferior talents, now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, and
then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and
"sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces;" the eternal brown
cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in
saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;--and try to feel what we are, and
what we might have been.

Take a single instance in one branch of archaeology. Let those who are
interested in the history of religion consider what a treasure we should
now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and
drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious
and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and
castles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other
subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the
same precision with which Gerard Douw or Mieris paint bas-reliefs of
Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in
ancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle
expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings habits,
histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches and
domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of
Europe--treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot
bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill
enough, if they had but the commonest s