But, assuming that we are again, some day, to become a civilized and governing race, deputing ironmongery, coal-digging, and lucre-digging, to our slaves in other countries, it is quite conceivable that, with an increasing knowledge of natural history, and desire for such knowledge, what is now done by careful, but inefficient, wood-cuts, and in ill-colored engravings, might be put in quite permanent sculptures, with inlay of variegated precious stones, on the outside of buildings, where such pictures would be little costly to the people; and in a more popular manner still, by Robbia ware and Palissy ware, and inlaid majolica, which would differ from the housewife's present favorite decoration of plates above her kitchen dresser, by being every piece of it various, instructive, and universally visible. 133. You hardly know, I suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream, or jest. Still, I do not absolutely propose to decorate our public buildings with sculpture wholly of this character; though beast, and fowl, and creeping things, and fishes, might all find room on such a building as the Solomon's House of a New Atlantis; and some of them might even become symbolic of much to us again. Passing through the Strand, only the other day, for instance, I saw four highly finished and delicately colored pictures of cock-fighting, which, for imitative quality, were nearly all that could be desired, going far beyond the Greek cock of Himera; and they would have delighted a Greek's soul, if they had meant as much as a Greek cock-fight; but they were only types of the "[Greek: endomachas alektor]," and of the spirit of home contest, which has been so fatal lately to the Bird of France; and not of the defense of one's own barnyard, in thought of which the Olympians set the cock on the pillars of their chariot course; and gave it goodly alliance in its battle, as you may see here, in what is left of the angle of moldering marble in the chair of the priest of Dionusos. The cast of it, from the center of the theater under the Acropolis, is in the British Museum; and I wanted its spiral for you, and this kneeling Angel of Victory;--it is late Greek art, but nobly systematic flat bas-relief. So I set Mr. Burgess to draw it; but neither he nor I, for a little while, could make out what the Angel of Victory was kneeling for. His attitude is an ancient and grandly conventional one among the Egyptians; and I was tracing it back to a kneeling goddess of the greatest dynasty of the Pharaohs--a goddess of Evening, or Death, laying down the sun out of her right hand;--when, one bright day, the shadows came out clear on the Athenian throne, and I saw that my Angel of Victory was only backing a cock at a cock-fight.