incipal light was every thing,
and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses
are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.

It is not, however, only in invention that men over-work themselves, but
in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the Pre-Raphaelites
specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence in failing
portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so long upon
them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that the hand
refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there are certain
qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness. For, let
them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common desire of
men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or "bold," or
"broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost every other
in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever mischief
may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this facility
of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all right if
only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the truth
remains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shall
torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed
that the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and
decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of
sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely
finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more
vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to
the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all
men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be
represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there
are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and
in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but
by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what
example is taken, be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo
himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines,
which no _slow_ effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do
not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be
united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and
especially of those with which they themselves have mo