OBSERVATIONS ON, AND RULES FOR, SKETCHING. The following hints, tending to further the tyro's progress in the delightful art of drawing, will not I trust prove unacceptable to such of your readers as are interested in the subject. For my own use I epitomized various directions relative to sketching, when I met with them in Gilpin's "Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty," and I shall feel particularly happy should my attempt at condensing much artistical matter from that interesting volume prove useful to the _amateur_: the _professor_ undergoes a regular, severe, but _essential_ course of study in that beautiful art, which is to purchase for him fame and emolument; but he who takes up his pencil merely for pastime, will do well to regulate its movements by a few _rules_, not cumbrous to the memory, and of easy application.--It is my intention briefly to state the object of Gilpin's first and second essays; from the third I have deduced those _rules for sketching_ which appeared most obviously to result from the tenour of his observations:-- Essay 1st discusses the difference between _actual_ and _picturesque_ beauty; _smoothness_ is usually allowed to enter into our ideas of the former, but _roughness_, or _ruggedness_ is decidedly _essential_ to the latter: for example--The smooth shaven lawn, the neatly turned walk, the classic marble portico, &c. &c. are _beautiful_; but the ruined castle, the chasmed mountain, the tempestuous ocean, &c. are _picturesque_, i.e. with appropriate accompaniments; for, after remarking that the sublime and beautiful are, with many persons, the divisions of the _picturesque_, our acute observer of nature adds, "sublimity alone cannot make an object picturesque," it must in form, colour, or accompaniment, have some degree of _beauty_ to render the epithet just. "Nothing can be more _sublime_ than the ocean, but wholly unaccompanied it has little of the picturesque." It should also be remembered that objects of rough and careless contour, as the worn cart-horse, and the tattered beggar (neither of them laying claim to an iota of _sublimity_) please better in a painting, than the sleekest racer, and the most finished belle of the _Magazin des Modes_.[4] [Footnote 4: It is singular, but almost true to an axiom, that objects capable of exciting disgust in their _reality_, confer delight in their pictorial _representation_; the interior of some wretched hovel, a sty and its inmates, and a boorish revel, will exemplify this. Our pleasure in that case arises _perhaps_ not from the objects represented, but from the _truth of the representation_. I know not that this paradox has ever been solved, and therefore with diffidence offer, that we are rather pleased with the _artist_ than his _subject_.]