rough--a work in which error was irremediable,
change impossible--which demanded the drudgery of a student, while it
involved the deliberation of a master--in which the patience of a
mechanic was to be united with the foresight of a magician--in which no
license could be indulged either to fitfulness of temper or felicity of
invention--in which haste was forbidden, yet languor fatal, and
consistency of conception no less incumbent than continuity of toil. Let
them reflect what kind of men must have been called up and trained by
work such as this, and then compare the tones of mind which are likely
to be produced by our present practice,--a practice in which alteration
is admitted to any extent in any stage--in which neither foundation is
laid nor end foreseen--in which all is dared and nothing resolved,
everything periled, nothing provided for--in which men play the
sycophant in the courts of their humors, and hunt wisps in the marshes
of their wits--a practice which invokes accident, evades law,
discredits application, despises system, and sets forth with chief
exultation, contingent beauty, and extempore invention.

126. But it is not only the fixed nature of the successive steps which
influenced the character of these early painters. A peculiar _direction_
was given to their efforts by the close attention to drawing which, as
Mr. Eastlake has especially noticed, was involved in the preparation of
the design on the white ground. That design was secured with a care and
finish which in many instances might seem altogether supererogatory.[18]
The preparation by John Bellini in the Florentine gallery is completed
with exhaustless diligence into even the portions farthest removed from
the light, where the thick brown of the shadows must necessarily have
afterwards concealed the greater part of the work. It was the discipline
undergone in producing this preparation which fixed the character of the
school. The most important part of the picture was executed not with the
brush, but with the point, and the refinements attainable by this
instrument dictated the treatment of their subject. Hence the transition
to etching and engraving, and the intense love of minute detail,
accompanied by an imaginative communication of dignity and power to the
smallest forms, in Albert Duerer and others. But this attention to
minutiae was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was
also affected by the method. Shade was not to be