I. PRIDE OF SCIENCE II. ROMAN RENAISSANCE 57

Nature. His work was symbolical and ornamental. So long as it was intelligible and lovely, he had no care to make it like Nature. As, for instance, when an old painter represented the glory round a saint’s head by a burnished plate of pure gold, he had no intention of imitating an effect of light. He meant to tell the spectator that the figure so decorated was saint, and to produce splendour of effect by the golden circle. It was no matter to him what light was like. So soon as it entered into his intention to represent the appearance of light, he was not long in discovering the natural facts necessary for his purpose.

§ 18. But this being fully allowed, it is still true that the accumulation of facts now known respecting visible phenomena is greater than any man could hope to gather for himself, and that it is well for him to be made acquainted with them; provided always, that he receive them only at their true value, and do not suffer himself to be misled by them. I say, at their true value; that is, an exceedingly small one. All the information which men can receive from the accumulated experience of others is of no use but to enable them more quickly and accurately to see for themselves. It will in nowise take the place of this personal sight. Nothing can be done well in art except by vision. Scientific principles and experiences are helps to the eye, as a microscope is; and they are of exactly as much use without the eye. No science of perspective, or of anything else, will enable us to draw the simplest natural line accurately, unless we see it and feel it. Science is soon at her wits’ end. All the professors of perspective in Europe could not, by perspective, draw the line of curve of a sea-beach; nay, could not outline one pool of the quiet water left among the sand. The eye and hand can do it, nothing else. All the rules of aerial perspective that ever were written, will not tell me how sharply the pines on the hill top are drawn at this moment on the sky. I shall know if I see them, and love them; not till then. I may study the laws of atmospheric gradation for fourscore years and ten, and I shall

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