We do this because we humbly wish to learn.

We have seen thirteen thousand St.Jeromes, and twenty-two thousand St.Marks, and sixteen thousand St.Matthews, and sixty thousand St.Sebastians, and four millions of assorted monks, undesignated, and we feel encouraged to believe that when we have seen some more of these various pictures, and had a larger experience, we shall begin to take an absorbing interest in them like our cultivated countrymen from Amerique.
Now it does give me real pain to speak in this almost unappreciative way of the old masters and their martyrs, because good friends of mine in the ship--friends who do thoroughly and conscientiously appreciate them and are in every way competent to discriminate between good pictures and inferior ones--have urged me for my own sake not to make public the fact that I lack this appreciation and this critical discrimination myself.

I believe that what I have written and may still write about pictures will give them pain, and I am honestly sorry for it.

I even promised that I would hide my uncouth sentiments in my own breast.

But alas! I never could keep a promise.