ns of ours.

We will have nothing to do with them.

Forced to seriousness, that emptiness may be hidden, they dare not
smile--

While the artist, in fulness of heart and head, is glad, and laughs
aloud, and is happy in his strength, and is merry at the pompous
pretension--the solemn silliness that surrounds him.

For Art and Joy go together, with bold openness, and high head, and
ready hand--fearing naught, and dreading no exposure.

Know, then, all beautiful women, that we are with you. Pay no heed, we
pray you, to this outcry of the unbecoming--this last plea for the
plain.

It concerns you not.

Your own instinct is near the truth--your own wit far surer guide than
the untaught ventures of thick heeled Apollos.

What! will you up and follow the first piper that leads you down
Petticoat Lane, there, on a Sabbath, to gather, for the week, from the
dull rags of ages wherewith to bedeck yourselves? that, beneath
your travestied awkwardness, we have trouble to find your own dainty
selves? Oh, fie! Is the world, then, exhausted? and must we go back
because the thumb of the mountebank jerks the other way?

Costume is not dress.

And the wearers of wardrobes may not be doctors of taste!

For by what authority shall these be pretty masters? Look well, and
nothing have they invented--nothing put together for comeliness' sake.

Haphazard from their shoulders hang the garments of the
hawker--combining in their person the motley of many manners with the
medley of the mummers' closet.

Set up as a warning, and a finger-post of danger, they point to the
disastrous effect of Art upon the middle classes.

* * * * *

Why this lifting of the brow in deprecation of the present--this
pathos in reference to the past?

If Art be rare to-day, it was seldom heretofore.

It is false, this teaching of decay.

The master stands in no relation to the moment at which he
occurs--a monument of isolation--hinting at sadness--having no part in
the progress of his fellow men.

He is also no more the product of civilisation than is the scientific
truth asserted dependent upon the wisdom of a period. The assertion
itself requires the _man_ to make it. The truth was from the
beginning.

So Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot
progress.

A silent indication of its wayward independence from all extraneous
advance, is in the absolutely unchanged condition and form of
implemen