preparation of materials and the most simple consistency in their use;
he has shown that their excellence was reached, and could only have been
reached, by stern and exact science, condescending to the observance,
care, and conquest of the most minute physical particulars and
hindrances; that the greatest of them never despised an aid nor avoided
a difficulty. The loss of imaginative liberty sometimes involved in a
too scrupulous attention to methods of execution is trivial compared to
the evils resulting from a careless or inefficient practice. The modes
in which, with every great painter, realization falls short of
conception are necessarily so many and so grievous, that he can ill
afford to undergo the additional discouragement caused by uncertain
methods and bad materials. Not only so, but even the choice of subjects,
the amount of completion attempted, nay, even the modes of conception
and measure of truth are in no small degree involved in the great
question of materials. On the habitual use of a light or dark ground may
depend the painter's preference of a broad and faithful, or partial and
scenic chiaroscuro; correspondent with the facility or fatality of
alterations, may be the exercise of indolent fancy, or disciplined
invention; and to the complexities of a system requiring time, patience,
and succession of process, may be owing the conversion of the ready
draughtsman into the resolute painter. Farther than this, who shall say
how unconquerable a barrier to all self-denying effort may exist in the
consciousness that the best that is accomplished can last but a few
years, and that the painter's travail must perish with his life?

102. It cannot have been without strong sense of this, the true dignity
and relation of his subject, that Mr. Eastlake has gone through a toil
far more irksome, far less selfish than any he could have undergone in
the practice of his art. The value which we attach to the volume
depends, however, rather on its preceptive than its antiquarian
character. As objects of historical inquiry merely, we cannot conceive
any questions less interesting than those relating to mechanical
operations generally, nor any honors less worthy of prolonged dispute
than those which are grounded merely on the invention or amelioration of
processes and pigments. The subject can only become historically
interesting when the means ascertained to have been employed at any
period are considered in their operatio