And the two points had better at first be placed at the small distance of an inch from each other, both because it is easy to draw so short a line, and because it is well for us to know, early in life, the look of the length of an inch. And when we have learned the look of our own English inch, we will proceed to learn the look of that which will probably be our currency measure of length, the French inch, for that is a better standard than ours, for European acceptance. Here, I had made arrangements for the production of a plate, and woodcut, to illustrate the first steps of elementary design; but the black-plague of cloud already more than once spoken of (as connected probably with the diminution of snow on the Alps), has rendered it impossible for my assistants to finish their work in time. This disappointment I accept thankfully as the ordinance of my careful and prudent mistress, Atropos,—the third Fors; and am indeed quickly enough apprehensive of her lesson in it. She wishes me, I doubt not, to recognize that I was foolish in designing the intrusion of technical advice into my political letters; and to understand that the giving of clear and separate directions for elementary art-practice is now an imperative duty for me, and that these art-lessons must be in companionship with my other school books on the Earth and its Flowers. I must needs do her bidding; and as I gather my past work on rocks and plants together, so I must, day by day, gather what I now know to be right of my past work on art together; and, not in sudden thought, but in the resumption of purpose which I humbly and sincerely entreat my mistress to pardon me for having abandoned under pressure of extreme fatigue, I will publish, in the same form as the geology and botany, what I desire to ratify, and fasten with nails in a sure place, with instant applicability to school and university exercises, of my former writings on art. [71] But this, I beg my readers to observe, will be the seventh large book I have actually at this time passing through the press; [72] besides having written and published four volumes of university lectures [73] in the last six years; every word of them weighed with care. This is what I observe the ‘Daily Telegraph’ calls giving ‘utterances few and far between.’ But it is as much certainly as I am able at present to manage; and I must beg my correspondents, therefore, to have generally patience with me when I don’t answer their letters by return of post; and above all things, to write them clear, and in a round hand, with all the ms and ns well distinguished from us.