If any reader has had patience with me until now, he or she may like to know the books which were of most use to me in my apprenticeship. There is no pleasanter instructress than Mrs. Jameson, although she is superficial and sentimental, a little lackadaisical indeed: her _Early Italian Painters_, _Sacred and Legendary Art_, and the supplementary volumes on the _Legends of the Madonna_ and of the _Monastic Orders_, and on those relating to the life of our Lord, have all been republished in this country. There is a finer book of the same order, Lord Lindsay's _Christian Art_, now out of print, but to be found in public libraries. M. Rio's work, _De l'Art Chrétien_ (let the purchaser beware of two volumes of _Epilogue_, which are autobiography), is a full and admirable history of religious art: it is written from a purely Roman Catholic point of view, and his opinions are deeply imbued by prejudice. The reader will soon perceive this, however, and be upon his guard, remembering that, after all, the Roman Catholic view is the true one whence to contemplate art from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, but that art and theology are not one, nor even akin. M. Rio does not mention the Spanish school, perhaps with reason, as the Virgins of Murillo, the saints of Zurburan and Ribera, scarcely belong to the realm of religious art: this deficiency is supplied by Stirling's _Annals of the Artists of Spain_. Kugler's _Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte_ (translated, I believe) is a capital and comprehensive work, including ancient as well as modern art; and the knowledge of the one is as necessary for the understanding of the other as an acquaintance with ancient history is for the comprehension of modern history. I cannot recommend Vasari's _Lives of the Italian Painters_ entertaining as it is, for so much of each page is taken up by notes of different editors and commentators denying flatly the assertions of the text that to read him for information seems waste of time. Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _New History of Painting in Italy_ is the latest English authority. Mr. Charles Perkins's _Tuscan Sculptors_, of which we have reason to be very proud, is already the accepted standard work everywhere. Kugler's _Handbook of the German and Dutch Schools_, edited by Sir Edmund Head, has not been superseded, I think. It is with great hesitation that I name Mr. Ruskin in the catalogue of guidebooks: he is so arbitrary and paradoxical, lays down the law so imperiously, and contradicts himself so insolently, that a learner attempting to follow him in his theories will be hopelessly bewildered. Yet nowhere are the eternal, underlying truths upon which art rests so clearly discerned and nobly defined as in _Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture_ and _The Stones of Venice_; and nowhere do we find such poetical or beautiful descriptions. Yes, one should read these earlier books of Ruskin's, if it be but for the pleasure they give.