The article quoted must be based upon the belief that there are no commonplace, ugly objects in nature. If we sit down and reason over, or use our microscopes upon any work of the Almighty, we can find wisdom and beauty therein, but that does not alter the fact that beauty and significance are distributed in degrees of more and less. 'Art is long and time is fleeting,' and the genuine artist has no hours to waste over the less significant and characteristic. Besides, each student deserving the name, has his own individuality, and will naturally select, and the more lovingly paint, objects in accordance with his especial bent of mind. Not that we would have him become one-sided, and neglect the study of matters that might some day be useful; but in this, as in all things else, he must temper feeling with judgment, and make the mechanical execution the simple, faithful handmaiden to truly imaginative conception. In the moral world we may cheerfully accept physical deformity for the sake of some elevated principle therewith developed; but in the realm of art, man's only sphere of creation, we want the best the artist can give us, the greatest truth with the highest beauty. We are not willing to take the truth without the beauty. If we are to be told that sunlight tipping the edges of trees produces certain effects upon those edges and the shadowed foliage behind, let the fact be worthily represented, and not so prosily set forth that the picture shall be to us simply a matter of curiosity. That those trees did actually stand and grow thus, is small comfort, for the artist might surely have found other and more interesting forms telling the same tale. If light falling through loose foliage does indeed make upon the garments of a lad lying beneath spots at a little distance wonderfully like mildew, then rather let the boy sit for us under a tree of denser foliage, where a pathetic subject will not risk an unintentionally comic treatment. If a stone-breaker's face corrupts in purple spots at a certain period after death, we would prefer him painted before corruption, and consequently hideousness, had begun. If women will wear gowns ugly in color and form, and will sit or stand in graceless positions, we can readily avoid such subjects, and bestow our careful finish upon more worthy models. Let us not be misunderstood; we well know that the humorous, the grotesque, the sublime may use ugliness to serve their own legitimate purposes, but then that ugliness must be humorous, grotesque, or sublime, and not flat, prosy, or revolting. A blemish is by no means necessarily an ugliness. A leaf nibbled by insects and consequently discolored, a lad with ragged jacket and soiled trowsers, a peasant girl with bent hat and tattered gown, are often more picturesque objects than the perfect leaf or the well-attired child.