APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 23 



Writing is a form of drawing ; therefore if you 

 give the same attention and trouble to drawing as you 

 do to writing, depend upon it, there is nobody who 



cannot be made to draw, more or less well I do 



not say for one moment you would make an artistic 

 draughtsman. Artists are not made ; they grow. 

 .... You can teach simple drawing, and you will 

 find it an implement of learning of extreme value. I do 

 not think its value can be exaggerated, because it 

 gives you the means of training the young in 

 attention and accuracy, which are the two things in 

 which all mankind are more deficient than in any 

 other mental quality whatever. 



If a man cannot get literary culture of the highest 

 kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, 

 and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to 

 mention only a few of our illustrious writers I 

 say, if he cannot get it out of those writers, he 

 cannot get it out of anything ; and I would assuredly 

 devote a very large portion of the time of every 

 English child to the careful study of the models of 

 English writing of such varied and wonderful kind 

 as we possess, and, what is still more important 

 and still more neglected, the habit of using that 

 language with precision, with force, and with 

 art. 



I fancy we are almost the only nation in the world 

 who seem to think that composition comes by nature. 

 The French attend to their own language, the 

 Germans study theirs ; but Englishmen do not seem 

 to think it is worth their while. 



