The spreading recognition of drawing as an element of education is one among many signs of the more rational views on mental culture now beginning to prevail.  Once more it may be remarked that teachers are at length adopting the course which Nature has perpetually been pressing on their notice.  The spontaneous attempts made by children to represent the men, houses, trees, and animals around them—­on a slate if they can get nothing better, or with lead-pencil on paper if they can beg them—­are familiar to all.  To be shown through a picture-book is one of their highest gratifications; and as usual, their strong imitative tendency presently generates in them the ambition to make pictures themselves also.  This effort to depict the striking things they see is a further instinctive exercise of the perceptions—­a means whereby still greater accuracy and completeness of observation are induced.  And alike by trying to interest us in their discoveries of the sensible properties of things, and by their endeavours to draw, they solicit from us just that kind of culture which they most need.

Had teachers been guided by Nature’s hints, not only in making drawing a part of education but in choosing modes of teaching it, they would have done still better than they have done.  What is that the child first tries to represent?  Things that are large, things that are attractive in colour, things round which its pleasurable associations most cluster—­human beings from whom it has received so many emotions; cows and dogs which interest by the many phenomena they present; houses that are hourly visible and strike by their size and contrast of parts.  And which of the processes of representation gives it most delight?  Colouring.  Paper and pencil are good in default of something better; but a box of paints and a brush—­these are the treasures.  The drawing of outlines immediately becomes secondary to colouring—­is gone through mainly with a view to the colouring; and if leave can be got to colour a book of prints, how great is the favour!  Now, ridiculous as such a position will seem to drawing-masters who postpone colouring and who teach form by a dreary discipline of copying lines, we believe that the course of culture thus indicated is the right one.  The priority of colour to form, which, as already pointed out, has a psychological basis, should be recognised from the beginning; and from the beginning also, the things imitated should be real.  That greater delight in colour which is not only conspicuous in children but persists in most persons throughout life, should be continuously employed as the natural stimulus to the mastery of the comparatively difficult and unattractive form:  the pleasure of the subsequent tinting should be the prospective reward for the labour of delineation.  And these efforts to represent interesting actualities should be encouraged; in the conviction that as, by a widening experience, simpler and more practicable objects become interesting, they too will