such as Raphael's in fresco, and Titian's on canvas;--if, I say, a painter, fixed in such faith in an entire, intellectual and manly truth, and maintaining that an Egyptian profile of a head, however decoratively applicable, was only noble for such human truth as it contained, and was imperfect and ignoble beside a work of Titian's, were shown, by his antagonist, the colored daguerreotype of a human body in its nakedness, and told that it was art such as that which he really advocated, and to such art that his principles, if carried out, would finally lead. 276. And because this question lies at the very root of the organization of the system of instruction for our youth, I venture boldly to express the surprise and regret with which I see our schools still agitated by assertions of the opposition of Naturalism to Invention, and to the higher conditions of art. Even in this very room I believe there has lately been question whether a sculptor should look at a real living creature of which he had to carve the image. I would answer in one sense,--no; that is to say, he ought to carve no living creature while he still needs to look at it. If we do not know what a human body is like, we certainly had better look, and look often, at it, before we carve it; but if we already know the human likeness so well that we can carve it by light of memory, we shall not need to ask whether we ought now to look at it or not; and what is true of man is true of all other creatures and organisms--of bird, and beast, and leaf. No assertion is more at variance with the laws of classical as well as of subsequent art than the common one that species should not be distinguished in great design. We might as well say that we ought to carve a man so as not to know him from an ape, as that we should carve a lily so as not to know it from a thistle. It is difficult for me to conceive how this can be asserted in the presence of any remains either of great Greek or Italian art. A Greek looked at a cockle-shell or a cuttlefish as carefully as he looked at an Olympic conqueror. The eagle of Elis, the lion of Velia, the horse of Syracuse, the bull of Thurii, the dolphin of Tarentum, the crab of Agrigentum, and the crawfish of Catana, are studied as closely, every one of them, as the Juno of Argos, or Apollo of Clazomenae. Idealism, so far from being contrary to special truth, is the very abstraction of speciality from everything else. It is the earnest statement of the characters which make man man, and cockle cockle, and flesh flesh, and fish fish. Feeble thinkers, indeed, always suppose that distinction of kind involves meanness of style; but the meanness is in the treatment, not in the distinction. There is a noble way of carving a man, and a mean one; and there is a noble way of carving a beetle, and a mean one; and a great sculptor carves his scarabaeus grandly, as he carves his king, while a mean sculptor makes vermin of both. And it is a