It is true that the pride of our knowledge and the intoxication of our power stun us, and therefore help us to bear with greater patience the want of more æsthetic pleasures. But this compensation, like all compensations, is of its very nature provisional. It is not possible utterly to destroy a need inherent in human nature. There is at the present day a certain tendency in the world to consider art as a superfluous frivolity, as a luxury only to be thought of in moments of leisure. Art and such-like superfluities are contrasted with what are called the serious occupations, the practical realities of life: industry, commerce, inventions, business, and wealth. Those who hold this opinion forget, however, that the sculptures of Phidias and the paintings of Raphael appeared in the world long before the steam-engine and the Voltaic pile. Are we, too, prepared in face of this fact to affirm, with the most advanced champion of the American idea of progress in my dialogue, that “history was off the track up to the discovery of America”? That if men had had any sense, they would have invented machinery and developed the sciences first, and then created and developed the arts? But even if we were prepared to maintain this paradoxical theory, another fact of common observation would be there to prove to us that beauty is not a luxury and whim of gentlemen of leisure, but a primary, universal, and indestructible need of our minds, which every human creature seeks to satisfy as best it can. Do we not see every day that the peasant and the artisan, items in modern civilisation though they are, no sooner have a little money than they try to procure for themselves ornaments, either for their persons or for their homes, which may be as tawdry as you like, but which to them seem beautiful and well worth the expenditure of some of the little money they have? Have we not seen that one of the merits of modern civilisation is that of satisfying the æsthetic needs of the masses? Why should we not expect, then, to find the same need, though in a refined and intense form, felt by those to whom superior intelligence and energy, or the favour of fortune, has granted the power to accumulate wealth in large quantities, those, in other words, who have at their disposal greater means of procuring for themselves the pleasures and good things of life?