_Answer._--If this question had been asked with an eye to business, we might answer that decorative art makes trade brisk, induces people to buy ornaments, and fills the pockets of dealers in curiosities. But this is not our aim. So long as we fail to look upon art as an earnest and serious study, as important and necessary to our social wellbeing as either ethics or science, the influence of decorative art must be confined to enticing people to plaster their walls with all sorts of China plate, or pay dearly for Japanese trays, screens, or cupboards, because they have not learnt to distinguish between the quaint and the comical, the beautiful and the ugly. Their taste is still on a level with that of untrained children, who have plenty of money in their pockets, do not know what to buy, and rush to purchase the ugliest monstrosities. If half the money that is wasted in these directions were to be devoted to the encouragement of our hard-working rising artists, we might soon boast of still greater successes than we can proudly point to, despite the adverse circumstances under which artists have to labour amongst us. Art with us is still looked upon as an extravagance, a luxury, as it was with the Romans of old, and this produces a craving for oddities. We hang up big china cockatoos, or place big china dogs, or stags with big china antlers, on our hearth-rugs. We have coarse china frogs and lizards, crabs or lobsters, from which we eat our fruit or fish; or a life-like salmon with staring eyes is brought on our table, its back takes off, and we scoop out the real cooked salmon with which its inside is filled. Form of dish, association of ideas, and action of the host are more worthy of anthropophagi than civilised beings of the nineteenth century. So long as art-history and esthetics are not made regular studies, not only in art-schools but also in general educational establishments, and especially ladies’ schools, our national consciousness of art in general and the requirements of our age in particular cannot improve. Art is a branch of human knowledge, ingenuity, and creative force in which ladies, trained to appreciate beauty, might be made better ‘helps,’ than in the kitchen, the pantry, or the larder. The national wealth of France consists in the nation’s superiority in taste and artistic skill. The French arrange a few artificial flowers with an exquisite understanding of the juxtaposition of colours and the combination of forms, and make us pay for a ‘bouquet’ on a bonnet from fifty to sixty francs, whilst the raw material costs from five to six francs; they do the same in terra-cotta, bronze, or iron. So long as everyone with us thinks himself justified in having his own bad taste gratified, because he can pay for it, decorative artists will serve that bad taste in all our household details. Art-history comprises not merely measurements of temples, heights of spires in feet, or of statues in cubits and inches.