
donkeys to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and ruins, all with a general
softness of black-lead surface, indicating that nature, if anything, was rather
satiny; and as Tom's feeling for the picturesque in landscape was at present
quite latent, it is not surprising that Mr. Goodrich's productions seemed to him
an uninteresting form of art. Mr. Tulliver, having a vague intention that Tom
should be put to some business which included the drawing out of plans and maps,
had complained to Mr. Riley, when he saw him at Mudport, that Tom seemed to be
learning nothing of that sort; whereupon that obliging adviser had suggested
that Tom should have drawing-lessons. Mr. Tulliver must not mind paying extra
for drawing: let Tom be made a good draughtsman, and he would be able to turn
his pencil to any purpose. So it was ordered that Tom should have
drawing-lessons; and whom should Mr. Stelling have selected as a master if not
Mr. Goodrich, who was considered quite at the head of his profession within a
circuit of twelve miles round King's Lorton? By which means Tom learned to make
an extremely fine point to his pencil, and to represent landscape with a »broad
generality,« which, doubtless from a narrow tendency in his mind to details, he
thought extremely dull.
    All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no
schools of design - before schoolmasters were invariably men of scrupulous
integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged minds and varied
culture. In those less-favoured days, it is no fable that there were other
clergymen besides Mr. Stelling who had narrow intellects and large wants, and
whose income, by a logical confusion to which Fortune, being a female as well as
blindfold, is peculiarly liable, was proportioned not to their wants but to
their intellect - with which income has clearly no inherent relation. The
problem these gentlemen had to solve was to readjust the proportion between
their wants and their income; and since wants are not easily starved to death,
the simpler method appeared to be - to raise their income. There was but one way
of doing this; any of those low callings in which men are obliged to do good
work at a low price were forbidden to clergymen: was it their fault if their
only resource was to turn out very poor work at a high price? Besides, how
should Mr. Stelling be expected to know that education was a delicate and
difficult business? any more than an animal endowed with a power of
