Moreover, history, like languages, is capable of being taught as literature; and the protest against the prevalent notion that high civilisation involves the decadence of beauty in any form implies belief in all the arts as subjects of cultivation in the schools of the future. It need not be supposed that the unreasonable waste of time entailed by the present method of teaching such a subject as drawing, and our curious neglect of sculpture and modelling, will be perpetuated. As we can already see the dawn of new ideas on both these subjects the tendency of the future in regard to them is not difficult to conceive, nor need space be consumed in discussing them in detail. Literature and poetry (the latter, I need hardly say, no longer made merely hateful as the subject of the fatuous torture called "learning by heart") with belles-lettres, drawing, painting, and sculpture, will no doubt be taught in an elementary way to all children, and the study of them developed further where a natural appetite demands it. In reply to the very natural question, "How can an art be taught?" it is only needful to say that minds exercised by being made to think about such subjects, are quite certain to exhibit special predilections in one place and special aversions in another, and that the ascertainment of these predilections and aversions will everywhere be made the subject of painstaking thought. While nobody seriously pretends nowadays that a taste for literature or the arts can be inoculated upon a child's understanding, I imagine that few will question the belief that a natural bent for any one of them can be assisted in its development, and that taste, while it is incapable of being artificially implanted, certainly is susceptible of being guided and assisted. The defect of routine teaching in æsthetics at present is the defect of all our systems of education. We try to do a scholar's thinking for him. We laboriously show him how to use a pencil and how to copy drawings and pictures; and sometimes (though this kind of instruction is usually retailed by the ingenious writers who endeavour to instruct the adult public through the Press) we even go to the trouble of telling him the kind of pictures he ought to admire (usually forgetting that in the house of Art there are many mansions, and that a disgust for the early Dutch masters does not necessarily imply an incapacity for appreciating Velasquez); but, whether in adolescence or maturity, we never seem to arrive at the point of trying to get people to think critically for themselves. We shall reform altogether the processes of artistic education in the course of this century.