In our consideration of this _third_ section of our subject we are unable to confine ourselves, as we have hitherto done, to a wholly general examination of the content and purport appropriate to painting, and the mode of configuration, which follows from its principle, for in so far as this art is built up on the particularity of characters and their situation, and upon form and its pose, colour, and so forth, we are compelled to fix in our minds and discuss the _actual reality_ of this art's separate productions. No study of painting is complete that does not take into its survey and is unable to enjoy and criticize the pictures themselves, in which the aspects of it we have examined are enforced. This is a general rule in the case of all art, but it applies with exceptional force to painting among those we have up to the present considered. In the case of architecture and sculpture, where the embrace of the content is more restricted, the means of exposition and configuration are to a less extent stamped with wealth and distinctive modification, and the particular aspects of their definition are simpler and more radical, we can more readily avail ourselves of copies, descriptions, and casts. It is essential in dealing with the art of painting that we should see the actual works themselves. In this case mere descriptions, however important they may be in a subsidiary sense, will not suffice. In the infinite variety, however, of its explication, the various aspects of which are united in particular works of art, these works appear to us in the first instance as a mere motley array, which, by reason of the fact that our review of it is based upon no principle of classification, is only to a small extent able to disclose to us the unique quality of individual pictures. And it follows from this that galleries, as a rule, if we are not already able to connect with each picture our knowledge of the country, period, school, and master to which it belongs, is simply a collection without meaning, in which we lose ourselves. The most profitable arrangement for study and enjoyment with our eyes is therefore an exhibition based on _historical sequence._ A collection of this kind, co-ordinated in relation to such a principle, unique and invaluable of its class, we shall shortly be able to admire in the picture gallery of the royal museum in this city[329]. In this we shall not only possess a historical survey of the technique of art in its stages of development, but shall have set before our minds, as an essential process with a history, that articulation of its ideal content in the distinctions of its schools, their various subject-matter, and their different modes of artistic conception and treatment. It is only through having given us a survey as consonant as this is with that vital process that we can form an idea from its origins in traditional and eclectic types, of the living growth of