al tints. Thus, my friends, you perceive that I am neither for
building a wall, nor for contriving windows so as to exclude light,
air, and earth. As much as any of you, I am for every man's sitting
under his own vine, and for his training, pruning, and eating its
fruit how he pleases. Let the artist paint, write, or carve, what and
how he wills, teach the world through sense or through thought,--I
will not dissent; I have no patent to entitle me to do so; nay, I
will be thoroughly satisfied with whatsoever he does, so long as it
is pure, unsensual, and earnestly true. But, as the mental is the
peculiar feature that places man apart from and above animals,--so
ought all that he does to be apart from and above their nature;
especially in the fine arts, which are the intellectual perfection of
the intellectual. And nothing short of this intellectual
perfection,--however much they may be pictures, poems, statues, or
music,--can rank such works to be works of Fine Art. They may have
merit,--nay, be useful, and hence, in some sort, have a purpose: but
they are as much works of Fine Art as Babel was the Temple of
Solomon.

_Sophon._ And man can be made to understand these truths--can be
drawn to crave for and love the fine arts: it is only to take him in
hand as we would take some animal--tenderly using it--entreating it,
as it were, to do its best--to put forth all its powers with all its
capable force and beauty. Nor is it so very difficult a task to
raise, in the low, conceptions of things high: the mass of men have a
fine appreciation of God and his goodness: and as active, charitable,
and sympathetic a nurture in the beautiful and true as they have
given to them in religion, would as surely and swiftly raise in them
an equally high appreciation of the fine arts. But, if the artist
would essay such a labour, he must show them what fine art is: and,
in order to do this effectually, as an architect clears away from
some sacred edifice which he restores the shambles and shops, which,
like filthy toads cowering on a precious monument, have squatted
themselves round its noble proportions; so must he remove from his
art-edifice the deformities which hide--the corruptions which shame
it.

_Christian._ How truly Sophon speaks a retrospective look will show.
The disfigurements which both he and I deplore are strictly what he
compared them to; they are shambles and shops grafted on a sacred
edifice. Still, indigenous art is sacr