xl Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. 



cannot draw. And as to teaching the principles of pictorial 

 art, it is practically unthouglit of. For besides technical 

 skill, a student should, I think, be instructed how to 

 distinguish between what is essentially picturesque, and 

 what is not. 



Sala some years ago said, " He who can draw, be it ever 

 so badly, has a dozen extra preference shares in every land- 

 scape, shares that are perpetually paying golden dividends. 

 He can not only see the fields and mountains, tlie rivers and 

 brooks, but he can eat and drink them. The flowers are a 

 continual feast, and when the rain is on them, and after 

 that the sun, they may be washed down with richest wines. 

 To the artistic eye, there are inexhaustible pleasures to be 

 found in the meanest objects. There are rich studies of 

 colour in a brick wall; of form in every hedge and stunted 

 pollard; of light and shade in every heap of stones on the 

 macadamised road ; of more than pre-Raffaelite stippling and 

 finish in every tuft of herbage and wild flower. The shadow 

 cast by a pigstye on a road ; by an omnibus driver's reins 

 on his horses' backs ; the picturesque form of a donkej^'-cart ; 

 the rags of a travelling tinker ; the drapery-folds in a 

 petticoat hung out to dry on a clothes line in the back yai'd ; 

 the rugged angularities of the lumps of coal in the grate ; 

 the sharp light upon the decanters at home — all these are 

 fruitful themes for musing and speculative pleasure. The 

 fisherman who can draw, has ten times more enjoyment in 

 his meditative pursuit, than the inartistic angler. An 

 acquaintance with art, takes roods, perches, furlongs from 

 the journey ; for however hard the ground may be, however 

 dreary the tract of country through which we journey, 

 though our twenty miles may lie in the whole distance 

 between dead walls, have we not always that giant scrap book 

 the sky above us — the sky with all its varieties of colour, 

 its rainy fringes, its changing forms and aspects ? I would 

 not have a man look upon the heavens in a purely paint-pot 

 spirit ; I would not have him consider every sky as merely 

 so much Naples-yellow, crimson-lake, and cobalt-blue, with 



