32 OLD HOUSES OF DERBY. 



called, "art recipes," the end of such a course will inevitably 

 be the production of nothing new or original, but of one dull 

 uniformity, quite destructive to all right feelings, and to all 

 freedom and independency of thought, without which it is 

 impossible to do anything worth notice in any branch of art 

 whatever. We cannot do better in bringing these remarks to 

 an end, than give a quotation from one of our most accomplished 

 writers on art, " The moral of all this is that we can hardly 

 be too careful to preserve so precious a thing as the inborn 

 quality of a person. An artist can never be, in the high 

 intellectual sense, successful, unless he expresses his own 

 idiosyncrasy in his art ; what is sometimes called success, the 

 clever, well-learned mimicry of another's performance, is not 

 success ; however lucrative, it is a wretched failure ; self-expression 

 is success in the fine arts, providing, of course, that the self is 

 worth expressing." 





