Eugenio knew nothing practically and very little theoretically of painting; but it appeared to him that what Hazlitt said was of equal force with respect to the fine art of literature; and that in his own American field the English race failed, as far as it had failed, for the same reason as that given by Hazlitt for its failure in painting. In his mind he went further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in refusing the consolation of our race's superiority in poetry because it was will and passion. As far as they had excelled in that, it was because they had tried hard and not neglected the means for the end. Where they had excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem would still have been better if the poet had taken more pains. In the case of prose, he thought we failed of the end because we were impatient of the means, and as elderly men will, he accused the present of being more hasty and indifferent to form than the past. He recalled the time when he was apprentice in the art in which he could not yet call himself a master workman, and thought how he tried to make what he did beautiful, and fashioned his work with tireless pains after some high model. Perhaps the young writers of this time were striving as earnestly; but he could not see it, or thought he could not. He fancied their eyes dazzled by the images of easy success, instead of taken with the glory of a thing beautifully done. He remembered, with fond emotion, how once his soul had glowed over some "cunning'st pattern of excelling nature," and had been filled with longing to learn from it the art of surprising some other mood or aspect of nature and making that loveliness or grandeur his own. He had talked with other youths who were trying at the same time to do good work, and he remembered that they too were trying in the same way; and now, long after, he fancied that their difference from the youth of the present day was in their willingness to strive for perfection in the means and to let the end take care of itself. The end could no more justify bad means in aesthetics than in ethics; in fact, without the carefully studied means there could be no artistic result. If it was true that the young writers of the present expected a high result from hurried or neglected processes, they could have only the results that Eugenio saw around him. If they admired these, and were coming to him for the secret of achieving them, they were coming to the wrong shop.