of digestion, which converts the real into the imaginative. Now, in early years, how rare it is that the naturally endowed artist is not ill fed--unhealthy diet of the mind entices him every where. If in the country, he is sparingly fed--sees little or nothing of Art, little perhaps beyond the Sign of an Inn--and is scarcely, from other sources of education, taught to look with the mind's eye, through the undignified appearance, to the actual dignity even of the nature he sees:--if he has lived in the city, the Print shops are inevitable lures to cheat him by little and little out of his natural taste, if there be one; for at first it can be but a mere germ. The works of greatness, of goodness, will be the last things that he will see; for seldom indeed will they be presented to his sight. For the pure, the sweet, the graceful, the dignified, he will have thrust before his eyes gaudy, tawdry caricature and grimace; and, worse still, perhaps wholly vulgar obscenities. Were he in his boyhood given a present in the pictorial line, it would be of an Opera-dancer or a race-course, or an abomination of London low life. What "slang" is to the ear, so would it be to the eye; and such is in nine cases out of ten the first education of those aspirants in art, who, ere they have unlearned any thing, set up for themselves--and abuse the old masters. Generally speaking, they are brought up in an anti-ideal school; the powers, therefore, that nature has given them, are not only uncultivated, but led astray; and similar education and similar tastes in the public, find them a market for very low, very worthless commodities. We have, in fact, a great deal to unlearn. The first step with us all, is, to unlearn. Could we see nothing bad it would not be so. That which would, at first view, be thought the greatest benefit to art, engraving, has but spread the wider the pestilence of false taste. It is from all this the earlier and greater painters were free. The evil, however, having once so spread, is not to be easily corrected. Bad taste has claimed a perpetuity of copyright. Good taste must proceed from an opposite source, and work in spite of the bad. It must come from publications, just criticisms, lives of painters,[4] familiar treatises on the principles of art; and more especially from national and other public galleries, to direct attention, and indeed to create a demand for those other auxiliary works. People will seek to understand and feel that which is continually put before them. Could they never see any but fine productions, they would soon have a relish for them that now is impossible; but by little and little, the sight of what is good will create a liking, and the liking will soon reach an adoration, and the unlearning process is imperceptibly going on. Corrupted as our eyes now are, we would venture to assert, that were you to offer, either in prints or originals, to boys of fourth and