314 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 



modern creeds, all virtue to the sun, use that virtue through, 

 your own heads and fingers, and apply your solar energies to 

 draw a skilful line or two, for once or twice in your life. You 

 may learn more by trying to engrave, like Goodall, the tip of 

 an ear, or the curl of a lock of hair, than by photographing 

 the entire population of the United States of America, black, 

 white, and neutral- tint. 



And one word, by the way, touching the complaints I hear 

 at my having set you to so fine work that it hurts your eyes. 

 You have noticed that all great sculptors and most of the 

 great painters of Florence began by being goldsmiths. Why 

 do you think the goldsmith's apprenticeship is so fruitful ? 

 Primarily, because it forces the boy to do small work, and 

 mind what he is about. Do you suppose Michael Angelo 

 learned his business by dashing or hitting at it ? He laid the 

 foundation of all his after power by doing precisely what I 

 am requiring my own pupils to do, copying German engrav- 

 ings in facsimile ! And for your eyes you all sit up at night 

 till you haven't got any eyes worth speaking of. Go to bed 

 at half -past nine, and get up at four, and you'll see something- 

 out of them, in time. 



124. Nevertheless, whatever admiration you may be brought 

 to feel, and with justice, for this lovely workmanship, the 

 more distinctly you comprehend its merits, the more distinctly 

 also will the question rise in your mind, How is it that a per- 

 formance so marvellous has yet taken no rank in the records 

 of art of any permanent or acknowledged kind ? How is 

 it that these vignettes from Stothard and Turner,* like the 



* I must again qualify the too sweeping statement of the text. I 

 think, as time passes, some of these nineteenth century line engravings 

 will become monumental. The first vignette of the garden, with the 

 cut hedges and fountain, for instance, in Rogers' poems, is so consum- 

 mate in its use of every possible artifice of delicate line, (note the look 

 of tremulous atmosphere got by the undulatory etched lines on the pave- 

 ment, and the broken masses, worked with dots, of the fountain foam,) 

 that I think it cannot but, with some of its companions, survive the ref- 

 use of its school, and become classic. I find in like manner, even with 

 all their faults and weaknesses, the vignettes to Heyne's Virgil to be 

 real art-possessions. 



