uld accept my excuse, and hear me patiently. You may imagine
that your work is wholly foreign to, and separate from mine. So far from
that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great
art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no
art among a shepherd people, if it remains at peace. There is no art
among an agricultural people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely
consistent with fine art; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is
unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it
exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is
based on battle.

Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own sake, you must, I
imagine, be surprised at my assertion that there is any such good fruit
of fighting. You supposed, probably, that your office was to defend the
works of peace, but certainly not to found them: nay, the common course
of war, you may have thought, was only to destroy them. And truly, I who
tell you this of the use of war, should have been the last of men to
tell you so, had I trusted my own experience only. Hear why: I have
given a considerable part of my life to the investigation of Venetian
painting and the result of that enquiry was my fixing upon one man as
the greatest of all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, of all
painters whatsoever. I formed this faith, (whether right or wrong
matters at present nothing,) in the supremacy of the painter Tintoret,
under a roof covered with his pictures; and of those pictures, three of
the noblest were then in the form of shreds of ragged canvas, mixed up
with the laths of the roof, rent through by three Austrian shells. Now
it is not every lecturer who _could_ tell you that he had seen three of
his favourite pictures torn to rags by bombshells. And after such a
sight, it is not every lecturer who _would_ tell you that, nevertheless,
war was the foundation of all great art.

Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful comparison of the
states of great historic races at different periods. Merely to show you
what I mean, I will sketch for you, very briefly, the broad steps of the
advance of the best art of the world. The first dawn of it is in Egypt;
and the power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation of death,
and of future judgment, by the mind of a nation of which the ruling
caste were priests, and the second, soldiers. The greatest works
produced by them a