“It is the business of a painter, in his choice of attitudes,” &c. See here the most important precept of all those which relate to painting. It belongs properly to a painter alone, and all the rest are borrowed either from learning, or from physic, or from the mathematics, or, in short, from other arts; for it is sufficient to have a natural wit and learning to make that which we call in painting, a good invention: for the design, we must have some insight into anatomy: to make buildings, and other things in perspective, we must have knowledge in the mathematics: and other arts will bring in their quotas, to furnish out the matter of a good picture. But for the economy, or ordering of the whole together, none but only the painter can understand it; because the end of the artist is pleasingly to deceive the eyes, which he can never accomplish if this part be wanting to him. A picture may have an ill effect, though the invention of it be truly understood, the design of it correct, and the colours of it the most beautiful and fine that can be employed in it. And, on the contrary, we may behold other pictures ill invented, ill designed, and painted with the most common colours, which shall have a very good effect, and which shall more pleasingly deceive. “Nothing pleases a man so much as order,” says Xenophon;[153] and Horace, in his “Art of Poetry,” lays it down as a rule, _Singula quæque locum teneant sortita decenter._ Set all things in their own peculiar place; And know, that order is the greatest grace. This precept is properly the use and application of all the rest; for which reason it requires much judgment. You are therefore in such manner to foresee things, that your picture may be painted in your head, before it comes upon the canvas. “When Menander,” says a celebrated author,[154] “had ordered the scenes of his comedy, he held it to be, in a manner, already made; though he had not begun the first verse of it.” It is an undoubted truth, that they who are endued with this foresight, work with incredible pleasure and facility; others, on the contrary, are perpetually changing, and rechanging their work, which, when it is ended, leaves them but anxiety for all their pains. It seems to me, that these sorts of pictures remind us of those old Gothic castles, made at several times; and which hold together only as it were by rags and patches.