The _realistic_ school has in later years had an immense influence with us. Art-critics have almost gone so far as to demand from the artist a correct rendering of the very stratification of rocks; or of the different kinds of soil, to such a degree that the farmer should be able to recognise the ground in which to sow oats or wheat. Pictures, according to these estheticists, should be geological maps, mineralogical collections, and, so far as flowers are concerned, perfect herbariums. When this school takes up the archæological view, it clings with indomitable tenacity to given forms, and checks imagination. Art is then only to be handled as the Greeks or Romans practised it. Either the Gothic or the Renaissance style is to be slavishly imitated. This school has one great drawback: it considers all things natural beautiful, and looks upon an imitation of that which _was_ as better than an exertion of the self-creative originality of the artist. B. The _historical_ school endeavours to bring before our eyes the past, so as to enable us to understand the present, and to influence the future of art. This school has followed two divergent directions, the Antique and the Gothic, the classical or romantic; the one holding that everything beautiful must be based upon Greek patterns; the other that all beauty is confined to the Gothic. The writers of these two schools bewilder the students; either driving them into a cold, soulless imitation of classic forms, or forcing them to sacrifice everything to trefoils, pinnacles, tracery, finials, buttresses, thin spires, painted windows, and pointed arches. C. The _critical_ school indulges in tall phrases, mere hypothetical paradoxes, often startling the world with speculations of the wildest sort. Art-critics frequently roam in the spheres of surmises; they have their good points, but often neglect reality, or the historical ground; they sacrifice everything to the idea, which is with them the only productive basis of everything existing in art.