If anything I can say here, on the subject of the painter's Art, will encourage intelligent people of any rank to turn a deaf ear to all that critics, connoisseurs, lecturers, and compilers of guide-books can tell them; to trust entirely to their own common sense when they are looking at pictures; and to express their opinions boldly, without the slightest reference to any precedents whatever--I shall have exactly achieved the object with which I now apply myself to the writing of this paper. Let me first ask, in regard to pictures in general, what it is that prevents the public from judging for themselves, and why the influence of Art in England is still limited to select circles,--still unfelt, as the phrase is, by all but the cultivated classes? Why do people want to look at their guide-books, before they can make up their minds about an old picture? Why do they ask connoisseurs and professional friends for a marked catalogue, before they venture inside the walls of the exhibition-rooms in Trafalgar Square? Why, when they are, for the most part, always ready to tell each other unreservedly what books they like, or what musical compositions are favourites with them, do they hesitate the moment pictures turn up as a topic of conversation, and intrench themselves doubtfully behind such cautious phrases, as, "I don't pretend to understand the subject,"--"I believe such and such a picture is much admired,"--"I am no judge," and so on? No judge! Does a really good picture want you to be a judge? Does it want you to have anything but eyes in your head, and the undisturbed possession of your senses? Is there any other branch of intellectual art which has such a direct appeal, by the very nature of it, to every sane human being as the art of painting? There it is, able to represent through a medium which offers itself to you palpably, in the shape of so many visible feet of canvass, actual human facts, and distinct aspects of Nature, which poetry can only describe, and which music can but obscurely hint at. The Art which can do this--and which has done it over and over again both in past and present times--is surely of all arts that one which least requires a course of critical training, before it can be approached on familiar terms. Whenever I see an intelligent man, which I often do, standing before a really eloquent and true picture, and asking his marked catalogue, or his newspaper, or his guide-book, whether he may safely admire it or not--I think of a man standing winking both eyes in the full glare of a cloudless August noon, and inquiring deferentially of an astronomical friend whether he is really justified in saying that the sun shines!