Right and delightful as it is to cultivate beauty, it is no doubt possible to carry the 'lust of the eye' too far like other things Those 'aesthetic' folks who worship Signorelli, and sit among blue china and green paper mourning over the 19th century and yearning for the Past like the lost Children in the Wood for the departed uncle, sometimes make us think we might be cloyed with beauty (if this be its haunt), till we would hail tripe and onions on Judson-dyed china for a relief.

There are other colours in the rainbow beside green and blue: the present is as good in its way as the past. Such teachers are far from helpful, save that they show us that if Taste means sensibility and judgment, there may be unhealthy sensibility and prejudiced judgment - and both may be affected. One of the reasons why average culture does not progress very fast, is because those who might guide it seem to study nature with such resolute obliquity of vision, and practise speaking the simplest things in the obscurest language, and 'pose' singular or to depart from existing fashions.' - The Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt), translated by S. G. C. Middlemore. and attitudinise so sedulously, that patience gives way before them and Culture gets blamed for the follies of its disciples. But whilst we accept the fact that rotten grass may taint a fair stream, we must not therefore give up the stream nor the grass in the meadow, but rather try to set the balance straight by cutting down the unhealthy products.

The past certainly produced more beautiful works than we do, and I hope to show, in a brief retrospect of ancient rooms, how much we may learn in the old schools. There are many reasons why it did so; though I doubt whether early art consciously aimed at being beautiful and pleasing (as, e.g., Renascence art did), so much as it aimed at being helpful and instructive, turning to edifying account every flat surface within reach.

One reason is, the old artists had ample time and a limited demand; now, there is a large demand, and limited time allowed. They worked by hand where we work by machinery; and the difference between the one, which bears evidence of an individual mind, over the other, which is quite unintelligent, must be clear to all. The force that with us runs into genre pictures only and perhaps literature, then ran into bronze-casting, stone-cutting, wood-carving, and missal-colouring: for carvings were the books of the people; art was their common library, so to speak; hence it was so largely used to expound religious precepts. Under such circumstances we can understand how the personal religion of the workman, or superstition if we choose to call it so, often rendered his work conscientious as well as quaint.

Still, the past was dirty and cruel, enslaved and suffering; we are better, morally, socially, physically, though we do not so much appreciate ornament. A far larger community is civilised, able to afford luxuries, and in a great hurry for them. And though religion does not enter into the artisan's scheme of work, and he can neither be terrified nor bribed into fervour, yet on the whole we are safer, healthier, freer, happier than ever we were.

Not that there was no bad, scamped work then as now; or varying qualities in tapestry and wainscot, of which the bad specimens have perished whilst the few best have survived. Not that everyone in Signorelli's day was as great as Signorelli. Rotten grass has existed from the beginning of the world. But it is in our power to weed away what is bad in all departments of life; and if we applied as much pressure to the labourers as we might if we ourselves knew right from wrong; if we appreciated the value of conscientious brain-work and honest study of nature in art-products as most cultivated people don't, we might now have results as beautiful as ever our ancestors had, and far more numerous. The supply always in the long run equals the demand. When we know what we want, we shall get it, but no class of persons so materially hinders the wholesome and wide-reaching reformation in domestic art as the class who sit aloof and say that art is not for the people but for the elect,1 that the 19th century is dead to beauty and the case hopeless - for they not only cause the Philistines to blaspheme, and make the new efforts ridiculous, but they exercise a numbing and depressing influence on those with whom the carrying out of the reform greatly lies, the better-educated tradesmen, who lose heart even with good intentions.

1 See Mr. Poynter's letters in the Times.