I have no doubt that this work, though done at first for the St. George’s Company, will be found generally useful, and especially that the system of drawing arranged for them will in many respects supersede that of Kensington. I had intended to write it separately for the use of schools; but after repeated endeavours to arrange it in a popular form, find that it will not so shape itself availably, but must consist of such broad statements of principle as my now enlarged experience enables me to make; with references to the parts of my other books in which they are defended or illustrated: and of directions for practice given as I can get illustrations of them prepared; leaving the systematization of them to be made by the master of each drawing school, according to the requirements of his scholars. (See page 19 of Letter IX.) For example of the impossibility of publishing on a system. It happens to be now fine weather here in Lancashire;—I am able, therefore, to draw out of doors; and am painting a piece of foreground vegetation, which I don’t want to be used by students till after at least fifty other exercises have been gone through. But I must do this one while light and life serve; and not wait till I am sixty, to do work which my eyes are not good enough for at fifty-five. And if the readers of Fors think my letters too desultory, let them consider what this chief work, specified in page 20 of Letter IX., involves. No one has the least notion of the quantity of manual labour I have to go through, to discharge my duty as a teacher of Art. Look at the frontispiece to Letter XX., which is photographed from one of my architectural sketches; and if you can draw, copy a bit of it;—try merely the bead moulding with its dentils, in the flat arch over the three small ones, lowest on the left. Then examine those three small ones themselves. You think I have drawn them distorted, carelessly, I suppose. No. That distortion is essential to the Gothic of the Pisan school; and I measured every one of the curves of those cusps on the spot, to the tenth of an inch; and I ought to be engraving and publishing those drawings, by rights; but, meantime, your Pisan Republicans dash the chapel down, for a job in rebuilding it;—and the French Emperor dashes every cathedral in France to pieces, to find his masons work,—and gets for result, Reuter’s telegram, (page 21 of Letter VI.); and I, with my eyes full of dust and driven smoke, am obliged to leave my own work, and write Fors, more and more necessarily becoming principal, as I find all my other work rendered vain. Nevertheless, in the course of Fors itself, I shall try to give, as aforesaid, art instruction enough for all need, if any one cares to obey it. How little any one is likely to care, the closing paragraphs of the letter from Wakefield show so clearly that I think it desirable to print them here consecutively, as part of the text of Fors itself.