162. Well, here is one reason, and a sufficiently logical one, as you will find it on consideration, for the exclusion of anatomical study from _all_ drawing schools. But there is a more cogent reason than this for its exclusion, especially from elementary drawing-schools. It may be sometimes desirable that a student should see, as I said, how very unlike a face a skull is; and at a leisure moment he may, without much harm, observe the equivocation between knees and ankles by which it is contrived that his legs, if properly made at the joints, will only bend backwards, but a crane's forwards. But that a young boy, or girl, brought up fresh to the schools of art from the country, should be set to stare, against every particle of wholesome grain in their natures, at the Elgin marbles, and to draw them with dismal application, until they imagine they like them, makes the whole youthful temper rotten with affectation, and sickly with strained and ambitious fancy. It is still worse for young persons to be compelled to endure the horror of the dissecting-room, or to be made familiar with the conditions of actual bodily form, in a climate where the restraints of dress must for ever prevent the body from being perfect in contour, or regarded with entirely simple feeling. 163. I have now, perhaps too often for your patience, told you that you must always draw for the sake of your subject--never for the sake of your picture. What you wish to see in reality, that you should make an effort to show, in pictures and statues; what you do not wish to see in reality, you should not try to draw. But there is, I suppose, a very general impression on the mind of persons interested in the arts, that because nations living in cold climates are necessarily unfamiliar with the sight of the naked body, therefore, art should take it upon herself to show it them; and that they will be elevated in thought, and made more simple and grave in temper, by seeing, at least in colour and marble, what the people of the south saw in its verity. 164. I have neither time nor inclination to enter at present into discussion of the various effects, on the morality of nations, of more or less frank showing of the nude form. There is no question that if shown at all, it should be shown fearlessly, and seen constantly; but I do not care at present to debate the question: neither will I delay you by any expression of my reasons for the rule I am about to give. Trust me, I have many; and I can assert to you as a positive and perpetual law, that so much of the nude body as in the daily life of the nation may be shown with modesty, and seen with reverence and delight,--so much, and no more, ought to be shown by the national arts, either of painting or sculpture. What, more than this, either art exhibits, will, assuredly, pervert taste, and, in all probability, morals.