There has been, in my opinion, too great a readiness on the part of most writers to assume that high civilisation necessarily creates epochs of ugliness. No doubt railways, factories and other civilised and civilising conveniences do not, in the natural course of things, tend to assume forms gratifying to the æsthetician. The present tendency of domestic architecture, for instance, shows an abject sort of spirit by basing any effort which it may make for comeliness on an attempt to imitate the picturesqueness of the past rather than to form new and beautiful styles adapted to modern requirements. Because old red-brick, timbered rough-cast, and the quaintly-shaped buildings of old time please the eye by contrast more than by inherent beauty, unintelligent builders just now think they can redeem dwelling-houses from plain ugliness by imitating these peculiarities, and they are encouraged in this course by the people who are to live in such houses and by the exploiters of estate development. But such fine examples as the new Westminster Cathedral show that the spirit of beauty has not left our architects. The growing intelligence of the new age ought, at all events, to develop, as its resources will reward, originality. And the developed æstheticism of the age will demand beautiful buildings, not slavishly copied from the antique, but created by the imagination of the modern. Reverence for natural beauty, already manifest in the revolt against advertisement-boards in juxtaposition with notable scenery and even along the sides of railways (where one would have thought that a little more ugliness could do no great harm) will no doubt be accentuated when the unviolated virginities of Nature have become fewer; and a steady growth of public taste is evidenced even now by the success of the better sort of street advertisements and the failure of the uglier kind, as demonstrated by the steady abandonment of the latter. The most fashionable artists no longer think it beneath them to design wall-posters. If the advertisers who pay their large fees find it profitable to purchase art in an expensive market, it must be because popular taste is better than it used to be; and even if the cult of the photograph and the process block in illustrated newspapers, to the detriment of drawings and wood engravings, be cited as evidence in the other direction, we have a right to quote in rebuttal of this the rather violent efforts of the more intelligent class of amateurs to secure a recognition of selective and manipulated photography as an art. Moreover, just as some critics have argued that it is better for the people to read the atrocious letterpress of the popular papers than not to read anything, it can also presumably be contended that it is better for the people to look at photographs reproduced by "process" than not to look at any pictures at all, though, in reality, it is doubtful whether bad pictures and inferior "literature" are not much worse