noticed that their work was wanting in originality. No doubt it was in detail true to nature. No doubt the colours were properly blended, and put on with great skill, exactitude, and softness, but there was a want of that dashing artistic effect, that light and shade, that glimmer and sheen, which stamps the true artistic genius that is only rarely met with. All these drawings and all these paintings of landscape had a preciseness and exactitude about them, that indicates continuous schooling by hard and fast rules and principles, rather than by the spontaneous outcome of genius.
When we got outside of the hall of painting, the Recorder stopped and said, "Now, my Specimen, explain to me what has been troubling you while in the School of Art?" "Well," I said, "I have been less impressed by this school of yours than by anything I have yet seen in your strange country. The drawing of your students is wonderfully exact, and their colouring is all that could be desired. So long as they keep to birds and subjects that
