the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does
not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the
one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom,
creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour
of birth, and can be neither learned nor stimulated. But the just and
dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to
another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation
of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character end to
end--these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to
some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.

*****

The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love,
of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation
of the writer and the painter.

*****

The life of the apprentice to any art is both unstrained and pleasing;
it is strewn with small successes in the midst of a career of failure,
patiently supported; the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain
progress; and if he come not appreciably nearer to the art of
Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.

*****

The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that writes,
but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who reads; and
when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have never done
or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in
past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine DILETTANTI but the
gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and
shades of manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal
with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and thus
ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields the
shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into a
near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things have on them the dew
of man's morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the semi-artificial
flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal taproot of the race. A
thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a thousand
perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art which was once the
fashion of an empire; and those only are perennial matters that rouse us
to-day, and that roused men in all epochs of the past.

*****

L'ART DE BIEN DIRE is but a drawing-