We cannot too frequently be reminded that we are nothing of ourselves, and by ourselves, and are only something by the place we hold in the intellectual chain of humanity by which electricity is conveyed to us and through us--to be increased in the transmission if we have great natural power and are favorably situated, but not otherwise. A child is born to the Vecelli family at Cadore, and when it is nine years old is taken to Venice and placed under the tuition of Sebastian Zuccato. Afterwards he goes to Bellini's school, and there gets acquainted with another student, one year his junior, whose name is Barbarelli. They live together and work together in Venice; then young Barbarelli (known to posterity as Giorgione), after putting on certain spaces of wall and squares of canvas such color as the world had never before seen, dies in his early manhood and leaves Vecellio, whom we call Titian, to work on there in Venice till the plague stays his hand in his hundredth year. The genius came into the world, but all the possibilities of his development depended upon the place and the time. He came exactly in the right place and precisely at the right time. To be born not far from Venice in the days of Bellini, to be taken there at nine years old, to have Giorgione for one's comrade, all this was as fortunate for an artistic career as the circumstances of Alexander of Macedon were for a career of conquest. LETTER III. TO AN ARTIST WHO WAS FITTING UP A MAGNIFICENT NEW STUDIO. Pleasure of planning a studio--Opinions of an outsider--Saint Bernard--Father Ravignan--Goethe's study and bed-room--Gustave Doré's studio--Leslie's painting-room--Turner's opinion--Habits of Scott and Dickens--Extremes good--Vulgar mediocrity not so good--Value of beautiful views to literary men--Montaigne--Views from the author's windows. Nothing in the life of an artist is more agreeable than the building and furnishing of the studio in which he hopes to produce his most mature and perfect work. It is so pleasant to labor when we are surrounded by beauty and convenience, that painters find a large and handsome studio to be an addition to the happiness of their lives, and they usually dream of it, and plan it, several years before the dream is realized.