ns' den, the supply is ample enough to make every child in these
islands think of the Bible as a somewhat dull story-book, allowed on
Sunday;--but of trained, wise, and worthy art, applied to gentle
purposes of instruction, no single example can be found in the shops of
the British printseller or bookseller. And after every dilettante tongue
in European society has filled drawing-room and academy alike with idle
clatter concerning the divinity of Raphael and Michael Angelo, for these
last hundred years, I cannot at this instant, for the first school which
I have some power of organizing under St. George's laws, get a good
print of Raphael's Madonna of the tribune, or an ordinarily intelligible
view of the side and dome of St. Peter's!

240. And there are simply no words for the mixed absurdity and
wickedness of the present popular demand for art, as shown by its supply
in our thoroughfares. Abroad, in the shops of the Rue de Rivoli,
brightest and most central of Parisian streets, the putrescent remnant
of what was once Catholicism promotes its poor gilded pedlars' ware of
nativity and crucifixion into such honorable corners as it can find
among the more costly and studious illuminations of the brothel: and
although, in Pall Mall, and the Strand, the large-margined
Landseer,--Stanfield,--or Turner-proofs, in a few stately windows, still
represent, uncared-for by the people, or inaccessible to them, the power
of an English school now wholly perished,--these are too surely
superseded, in the windows that stop the crowd, by the thrilling
attraction with which Dore, Gerome, and Tadema have invested the
gambling table, the dueling ground, and the arena; or by the more
material and almost tangible truth with which the apothecary-artist
stereographs the stripped actress, and the railway mound.

241. Under these conditions, as I have now repeatedly asserted, no
professorship, nor school, of art can be of the least use to the general
public. No race can understand a visionary landscape, which blasts its
real mountains into ruin, and blackens its river-beds with foam of
poison. Nor is it of the least use to exhibit ideal Diana at Kensington,
while substantial Phryne may be worshiped in the Strand. The only
recovery of our art-power possible,--nay, when once we know the full
meaning of it, the only one desirable,--must result from the
purification of the nation's heart, and chastisement of its life:
utterly hopeless now, for our a