painter is concerned in it. By imitation I do not mean imitation

in its largest sense, but simply the following of other masters,

and the advantage to be drawn from the study of their works.

Those who have undertaken to write on our art, and have represented

it as a kind of inspiration, as a gift bestowed upon peculiar

favourites at their birth, seem to ensure a much more favourable

disposition from their readers, and have a much more captivating

and liberal air, than he who goes about to examine, coldly, whether

there are any means by which this art may be acquired; how our mind

may be strengthened and expanded, and what guides will show the way

to eminence.

It is very natural for those who are unacquainted with the cause of

anything extraordinary to be astonished at the effect, and to

consider it as a kind of magic. They, who have never observed the

gradation by which art is acquired, who see only what is the full

result of long labour and application of an infinite number, and

infinite variety of acts, are apt to conclude from their entire

inability to do the same at once, that it is not only inaccessible

to themselves, but can be done by those only who have some gift of

the nature of inspiration bestowed upon them.

The travellers into the East tell us that when the ignorant

inhabitants of these countries are asked concerning the ruins of

stately edifices yet remaining amongst them, the melancholy

monuments of their former grandeur and long-lost science, they

always answer that they were built by magicians. The untaught mind

finds a vast gulf between its own powers and these works of

complicated art which it is utterly unable to fathom. And it

supposes that such a void can be passed only by supernatural

powers.

And, as for artists themselves, it is by no means their interest to