ing things of use and of beauty,
homely things, princely things, things of beauty for beauty's
adornment, noble things for a city's; all amid Nature's own, yet
unsullied, immense creativeness, all for the admiration and use of
vigorous emergent and vanishing generations, whose common bond in life
was the thing so made, its beauty and its use.

We may now leave the explanatory preludes, the Notes, and turn to the
Lectures, to which reference has already been made. They were given, I
think, at each Exhibition, except the last, and in the Exhibition
itself, and were meant, besides the objects officially announced in the
catalogues, to widen the scope of the Exhibitions, otherwise restricted
to things of minor importance only, and to extend the attention of the
public to things not present in the Exhibition, though to be imagined
and thought of in association with it. And here we may expect to find,
and shall find, as I shall show, a more extended view of the aims of
the Society as set out by itself.

It is matter of regret that, save one series presently to be mentioned,
and a lecture by William Morris, no record has been kept of them. They
were delivered, and are now perhaps forgotten. And yet how stimulating,
how interesting the circumstances of some of them! William Morris, on a
raised platform, surrounded by products of the loom, at work upon a
model loom specially constructed from his design--now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum--to show how the wools were inwrought, and the
visions of his brain fixed in colour and in form; Walter Crane, backed
by a great black board, wiped clean, alas! when one would have had it
remain for ever still adorned by the spontaneous creations of his
inexhaustible brain; George Simmonds, demonstrating to us the uses of
the thumb, and how under its pressure things of clay rose into life;
Lewis Day, designing as he spoke, and bringing before our inner eye, as
well as the outer, the patterns of Asia and of Europe in stage after
stage of development; Selwyn Image, by his studied elocution, taking us
back to the church which he had left, but with sweet reasonableness
depicting before its shadowy background the bright new Jerusalem toward
which his enfranchised imagination burned; Lethaby, entrancing us with
the cities which crowned the hills of Europe, or sat in white on the
still seashore, or mirrored in the waters of Italy: all vanished, save
the memory of them! And here, dwelling in memory