159. And I attach great importance to the sound education of our younger females in art, thinking that in England the nursery and the drawing-room are perhaps the most influential of academies. We address ourselves in vain to the education of the artist while the demand for his work is uncertain or unintelligent; nor can art be considered as having any serious influence on a nation while gilded papers form the principal splendour of the reception room, and ill-wrought though costly trinkets the principal entertainment of the boudoir. It is surely, therefore, to be regretted that the art-education of our Government schools is addressed so definitely to the guidance of the artizan, and is therefore so little acknowledged hitherto by the general public, especially by its upper classes. I have not acquaintance enough with the practical working of that system to venture any expression of opinion respecting its general expediency; but it is my conviction that, so far as references are involved in it to the designing of patterns capable of being produced by machinery, such references must materially diminish its utility considered as a general system of instruction. 160. We are still, therefore, driven to the same point,--the need of an authoritative recommendation of some method of study to the public; a method determined upon by the concurrence of some of our best painters, and avowedly sanctioned by them, so as to leave no room for hesitation in its acceptance. Nor need it be thought that, because the ultimate methods of work employed by painters vary according to the particular effects produced by each, there would be any difficulty in obtaining their collective assent to a system of elementary precept. The facts of which it is necessary that the student should be assured in his early efforts, are so simple, so few, and so well known to all able draughtsmen that, as I have just said, it would be rather doubt of the need of stating what seemed to them self-evident, than reluctance to speak authoritatively on points capable of dispute, that would stand in the way of their giving form to a code of general instruction. To take merely two instances: It will perhaps appear hardly credible that among amateur students, however far advanced in more showy accomplishments, there will not be found one in a hundred who can make an accurate drawing to scale. It is much if they can copy anything with approximate fidelity of its real size. Now, the inaccuracy of eye which prevents a student from drawing to scale is in fact nothing else than an entire want of appreciation of proportion, and therefore of composition. He who alters the relations of dimensions to each other in his copy, shows that he does not enjoy those relations in the original--that is to say, that all appreciation of noble design (which is based on the most exquisite relations of magnitude) is impossible to him. To give him habits of mathematical accuracy in