The insanity of water-colours must have continued for many years. I say insanity, because I can plainly perceive now that I had not the slightest genuine aptitude for graphic art. In the curriculum of South Kensington as taught at a provincial art school I never got beyond the stage known technically as "third-grade freehand," and even in that my "lining-in" was considered to be a little worse than mediocre. O floral forms, how laboriously I deprived you of the grace of your Hellenic convention! As for the "round" and the "antique," as for pigments, these mysteries were withheld from me by South Kensington. It was at home, drawn on by a futile but imperious fascination, that I practised them, and water-colours in particular. I never went to nature; I had not the skill, nor do I remember that I felt any sympathetic appreciation of nature. I was content to copy. I wasted the substance of uncles and aunts in a complicated and imposing apparatus of easels, mahlsticks, boards, What-man, camel-hair, and labelled tubes. I rose early, I cheated school and office, I outraged the sanctity of the English Sabbath, merely to satisfy an ardour of copying. I existed on the Grand Canal in Venice; at Toledo, Nuremburg, and Delft; and on slopes commanding a view of Turner's ruined abbeys, those abbeys through whose romantic windows streamed a yellow moonlight inimitable by any combination of ochre, lemon, and gamboge in my paint-box. Every replica that I produced was the history of a disillusion. With what a sanguine sweep I laid on the first broad washes--the pure blue of water, the misty rose of sun-steeped palaces, the translucent sapphire of Venetian and Spanish skies! And then what a horrible muddying ensued, what a fading-away of magic and defloriation of hopes, as in detail after detail the picture gradually lost tone and clarity! It is to my credit that I was always disgusted by the fatuity of these efforts. I have not yet ceased to wonder what precise part of the supreme purpose was served by seven or eight years of them.