"Do not all remember how we leaped for joy at the reading of it?"
"Even Atlas himself laughed aloud, and, handicapped as he is with the World, and weighted with wisdom, danced upon his plinth, a slow measure of reckless acquiescence, as I set down in the chronicles of all time that 'Arry, 'unable, by mere sense of smell, to distinguish between oil and water-colour, might at least have inquired; and that either the fireman or the guardian in the Gallery could have told him not to blunder in the Times.'"
"But no, he never would ask—he liked his potshots at things; it used to give a sort of sporting interest to his speculations upon pictures. And so he was ever obstinate—or any one at the Fine Art Society would have told him the difference between an etching and a photograph.—I am, good sir, yours, etc."
Atlas, à bientôt.
St. Ives, Cornwall,
Jan. 25, 1834.
Propositions—No. 2
A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.
To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.