But the labour and pains, the study and industry early employed and long continued, in the cultivation of the arts, naturally and necessarily advanced their progress in a striking manner: raising them to such a height of perfection as we weakly think unattainable, because we will not use the adequate means of endeavouring to attain it. Labour is to man, from his constitution and his frame, the real price of every truly valuable acquisition; which, though indolence spurns and idleness rejects, always brings its own reward with it, whether we are ultimately successful or not, in the consciousness of having acted a manly part, and in the vigour of mind and health of body which it, and it alone, invariably confers. Some fortuitous instances may be mentioned of those who have possessed both without its aid; of those who, nursed on the lap of indolence, and folded in the arms of idleness, have enjoyed that first of human blessings, a sound mind in a sound body: but they are instances to astonish, not examples to incite. This is even more strictly and peculiarly true as it regards the arts, than it is in several other cases. For the great merit of painting and sculpture consisting in their exact and captivating copies of nature, and of architecture in its combination of beauty with grandeur, of convenience with magnificence, it is obvious that these qualities are never the casual effects of chance and accident, of lucky hits and fortunate events; but the steady results of pains and care, of study and attention. Of this truth the professors of the arts in Greece were quickly and fully convinced; and applied that conviction to its only proper purpose, to an unremitting labour on their own appropriate pursuit: a labour which, paramount over each other object, neither pleasure prevented, nor politics precluded, nor the calls of animal life hindered. To excel in their art, to surpass their predecessors, to outstrip their competitors, to be the conspicuous subject of Grecian admiration, were the objects of their daily thoughts and of their nightly dreams: objects which scarce for a moment retired from their view, or, if for a moment retiring, it was only that they might recur again with renovated force. The[l] _multa dies et multa litura_ which the Roman poet ascribes to the Grecian writers, and to which he truly attributes their superior merit, were still more eminently true of their artists; who applied to the completion of their various works a severity of study and a perseverance of labour that to us, habituated to very different manners indeed, seem surprizing; but of which the authenticated accounts cannot be disputed. As exalted character, not the mere making of money, was the aim to which their thoughts were directed, it was pursued with that eagerness which honest ambition ever creates: and though, incidentally, fortune frequently followed their fame, as it came unsought for, none of its degrading motives swayed their conduct.