instruction in our schools of art. Many teachers of drawing, however, still assert, that, by copying the great works of the ancients, the mind of the pupil will become imbued with ideas similar to theirs—that he will imbibe their feeling for the beautiful, and thereby become inspired with their genius, and think as they thought. To study carefully and to investigate the principles which constitute the excellence of the works of the ancients, is no doubt of much benefit to the student; but it would be as unreasonable to suppose that he should become inspired with artistic genius by merely copying them, as it would be to imagine, that, in literature, poetic inspiration could be created by making boys transcribe or repeat the works of the ancient poets. Sir Joshua Reynolds considered copying as a delusive kind of industry, and has observed, that “Nature herself is not to be too closely copied,” asserting that “there are excellences in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature,” and that “a mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great.” Proclus, an eminent philosopher and mathematician of the later Platonist school (A.D. 485), says, that “he who takes for his model such forms as nature produces, and confines himself to an exact imitation of these, will never attain to what is perfectly beautiful. For the works of nature are full of disproportion, and fall very short of the true standard of beauty.” It is remarked by Mr. J. C. Daniel, in the introduction to his translation of M. Victor Cousin’s “Philosophy of the Beautiful,” that “the English writers have advocated no theory which allows the beautiful to be universal and absolute; nor have they professedly founded their views on original and ultimate principles. Thus the doctrine of the English school has for the most part been, that beauty is mutable and special, and the inference that has been drawn from this teaching is, that all tastes are equally just, provided that each man speaks of what he feels.” He then observes, that the German, and some of the French writers, have thought far differently; for with them the beautiful is “simple, immutable, absolute, though its _forms_ are manifold.” So far back as the year 1725, the same truths advanced by the modern German and French writers, and so eloquently illustrated by M. Cousin, were given to the world by Hutchison in his “Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue.” This author says—“We, by absolute beauty, understand only that beauty which we perceive in objects, without comparison to any thing external, of which the object is supposed an imitation or picture, such as the beauty perceived from the works of nature, artificial forms, figures, theorems. Comparative or relative beauty is that which we perceive in objects commonly considered as imitations or resemblances of something else.”