ature, represented by a few magazines and annuals arranged in a
star on the drawing-room table, are felt to be entirely foreign to the
daily business of life, and entirely unnecessary to its domestic
pleasures.

101. The introduction of furniture of Art into households of this latter
class is now taking place rapidly; and, of course, by the usual system
of the ingenious English practical mind, will take place under the
general law of supply and demand; that is to say, that whatever a class
of consumers, entirely unacquainted with the different qualities of the
article they are buying, choose to ask for, will be duly supplied to
them by the trade. I observe that this beautiful system is gradually
extending lower and lower in education; and that children, like grown-up
persons, are more and more able to obtain their toys without any
reference to what is useful or useless, or right or wrong; but on the
great horseleech's law of "demand and supply." And, indeed, I write
these papers, knowing well how effectless all speculations on abstract
proprieties or possibilities must be in the present ravening state of
national desire for excitement; but the tracing of moral or of
mathematical law brings its own quiet reward; though it may be, for the
time, impossible to apply either to use.

The power of the new influences which have been brought to bear on the
middle-class mind, with respect to Art, may be sufficiently seen in the
great rise in the price of pictures which has taken place (principally
during the last twenty years) owing to the interest occasioned by
national exhibitions, coupled with facilities of carriage, stimulating
the activity of dealers, and the collateral discovery by mercantile men
that pictures are not a bad investment.

102. The following copy of a document in my own possession will give us
a sufficiently accurate standard of Art-price at the date of it:--

"London, June 11th, 1814.

"Received of Mr. Cooke the sum of twenty-two pounds ten shillings
for three drawings, viz., Lyme, Land's End, and Poole.

"L22, 10s.

"J. M. W. TURNER."

It would be a very pleasant surprise to me if any _one_ of these three
(southern coast) drawings, for which the artist received seven guineas
each (the odd nine shillings being, I suppose, for the great resource of
tale-tellers about Turner--"coach-hire") were now offered