igh authority: and I hold it
one of the most sorrowful facts connected with the decline of the arts
among us, that English gentlemen, of high standing as scholars and
artists, should have been blinded into the acceptance, and betrayed
into the assertion of a fallacy which only authority such as theirs
could have rendered for an instant credible. For the contrary of it is
written in the history of all great nations; it is the one sentence
always inscribed on the steps of their thrones; the one concordant
voice in which they speak to us out of their dust.

All such nations first manifest themselves as a pure and beautiful
animal race, with intense energy and imagination. They live lives of
hardship by choice, and by grand instinct of manly discipline: they
become fierce and irresistible soldiers; the nation is always its own
army, and their king, or chief head of government, is always their
first soldier. Pharaoh, or David, or Leonidas, or Valerius, or
Barbarossa, or Coeur de Lion, or St. Louis, or Dandolo, or Frederick
the Great:--Egyptian, Jew, Greek, Roman, German, English, French,
Venetian,--that is inviolable law for them all; their king must be
their first soldier, or they cannot be in progressive power. Then,
after their great military period, comes the domestic period; in
which, without betraying the discipline of war, they add to their
great soldiership the delights and possessions of a delicate and
tender home-life: and then, for all nations, is the time of their
perfect art, which is the fruit, the evidence, the reward of their
national ideal of character, developed by the finished care of the
occupations of peace. That is the history of all true art that ever
was, or can be: palpably the history of it,--unmistakably,--written on
the forehead of it in letters of light,--in tongues of fire, by which
the seal of virtue is branded as deep as ever iron burnt into a
convict's flesh the seal of crime. But always, hitherto, after the
great period, has followed the day of luxury, and pursuit of the arts
for pleasure only. And all has so ended.

Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have here asserted two
things,--first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the
foundation of moral character in war. I must make both these
assertions clearer, and prove them.

First, of the foundation of art in moral character. Of course art-gift
and amiability of disposition are two different things. A good man is
not neces