. Now 700L. is to 50,000,000L.
roughly, as seven pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose then, a
gentleman of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured
from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park-walls and
footmen only, professes himself fond of science; and that one of his
servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of
fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for the sum
of seven pence sterling; and that the gentleman, who is fond of
science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, after
keeping his servant waiting several months, "Well! I'll give you four
pence for them, if you will be answerable for the extra three pence
yourself, till next year!"

34. III.--I say you have despised Art! "What!" you again answer,
"have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we not pay thousands
of pounds for single pictures? and have we not Art schools and
institutions, more than ever nation had before?" Yes, truly, but all
that is for the sake of the shop. You would fain sell canvas as well
as coals, and crockery as well as iron; you would take every other
nation's bread out of its mouth if you could;[11] not being able to do
that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thoroughfares of the world,
like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to every passer-by, "What d'ye
lack?" You know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances; you
fancy that, among your damp, flat fields of clay, you can have as quick
art-fancy as the Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian
under his volcanic cliffs;--that art may be learned as book-keeping is,
and when learned, will give you more books to keep. You care for
pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for the bills pasted on your
dead walls. There is always room on the walls for the bills to be
read,--never for the pictures to be seen. You do not know what
pictures you have (by repute) in the country, nor whether they are
false or true, nor whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign
countries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world
rotting in abandoned wreck--(in Venice you saw the Austrian guns
deliberately pointed at the palaces containing them), and if you heard
that all the fine pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow
on the Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so much as the chance
of a brace or two of game less in your own bags, in a day's shooting.
That