Just to paint is great fun. The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with that you see fascinating and absolutely a bsorbing. Try it if you have not already done so-before you die. As slowly one begins to escape from the difficulties of choosing the right colours and laying them on in the right places and in the right way, wider considerations come into view. One begins to see, for instance, that painting a picture is like fighting a battle, and typing to-paint a picture is, I suppose, like trying to fight a battle. It is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained, interlocked argument. It is a proposition which, whether of few or numberless parts, is commanded by a single conception. And we think-though I cannot tell-that painting a great picture must require an intellect on the grand scale. There must be that all-embracing view which presents the beginning and the end, the whole and each part, as one instantaneous impression retentively and untiringly held in the mind. When we look at the larger Turners-canvases yards wide and tall-and observe that they are all done in one piece and represent one single second of time, and that every innumerable detail, however small, however distant, however subordinate is set forth naturally and in its true proportion and relation, without effort, without failure, we must feel in presence of an intellectual manifestation the equal in quality and intensity of the finest achievements of warlike action, of forensic argument, of scientific adjudication. I think that a heightened sense of observation of Nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint. No doubt many people who are lovers of art have acquired it in a high degree without actually practising. But I expect that nothing makes one observe more quickly or more thoroughly than having to face the difficulty of representing the thing observed.