than at first, for unless we have adopted some plan of selection we begin by looking at every picture.  After a while we merely glance at the greater number, and get over the ground much more quickly, though we spend a long time before the rest.  If in this cursory survey a picture strikes and pleases you, look at it by all means, return to it again and again, and see whether the charm works or wears out:  it may be the starting-point of your whole career of enjoyment.  Do not run counter to your natural impulse if you have any:  no matter whether you suspect the picture to be bad or by an inferior master, look at it and enjoy it as much as you can.  If you are only honest with yourself, you will not care for it long if it be poor.

A good plan for getting our ideas into order on going into a gallery is to take one master and look only at his works for a day or two, and then at the others of his school, else there is a terrible confusion of names, dates, periods, manners and subjects in our heads.  This cannot always be accomplished, for in some choice collections there are but a few specimens of each master, though in the large ones there are always more than enough for a beginner’s first day.  It is best to begin with a comparatively modern master, and work back gradually, otherwise the eye is puzzled by inaccuracies of drawing, perspective, color.  The early painters can hardly be expected to delight us at first:  we are shocked by the unnatural proportions, the grotesque countenances.  To cite an extreme case, the first view of Giotto’s frescoes, where men and women with bodies of board, long jointless fingers, rigid plastered hair, and dark-rimmed slits for eyes whose oblique glance imparts an air of suspicion to the whole assembly, will suggest merely a notion of their grotesqueness.  By and by we shall grow used to the deformities, and recognize the primitive truthfulness of attitude and expression, the spirit which animates these ungainly forms and faces, until at length we look at the painter with the eyes of his contemporaries, and judge him by the standards of his own time, on which his claims rest.  Then we shall admire him.  The Venetians of the sixteenth century are the easiest to look at, however much of their genius and wonderful skill be lost on a novice, for they knew as much about anatomy and perspective as any painter of to-day, and their men and women are such glorious creatures, with backgrounds of such stately architecture or such magnificent scenery, all displayed in a revel of color, that pleasure outruns comprehension in the beholder.

The subject of a work of art exercises a great influence at first.  Some subjects naturally attract, others awe, others repel, and some have no interest for us whatever:  this, of course, is entirely apart from the intrinsic sources of enjoyment.  Next we are affected by the way in which the subject is treated; and this, too, is a moral or intellectual appreciation, rather than an aesthetic one.  Perhaps,