fourteenth to the one in which we live. But each art has also had its special period of development, reaching in its own good time the goal of its own particular efforts, under the conditions of its own peculiar medium. There are as a rule several successive stages in the evolution an art thus undergoes under the spur of idealism. First there is the vague inner sense of a new weight of meaning to be expressed, fresh insight or intuition that demands utterance. Men awake to the true value of those inner impressions and feelings which have so long been smothered under conventions and the worship of the external. They know not what to do with them, how to voice them; but they have at least what Stevenson calls “that impotent sense of his own value, as of a ship aground, which is one of the agonies of youth.” This may be called the period of the fresh insight. Then comes the period in which some sort of technical medium is arduously developed for the expression of the new impulse. This period, in which a vast work must be done by patient experiment, by slow adaptation, without standards and without models, is necessarily long and laborious. Often the prompting insight is almost forgotten in the toil, and the initial passion seems to be lost in dry formalism and pedantry. But all the while ways and means are being invented, problems solved, and traditions established, even as, while the youth toils at desk or plough or counter, forgetful, for the moment, of the ideals that sent him thither, habits are being formed, mastery is being acquired. The period of technical equipment, then, if it be properly conducted, leads over into the period of achievement, in which the original impulses are adequately expressed by means of the acquired skill. This is the time of consummation, of maturity, of balance between the means and the ends of expression. Such was the age of Pericles in Greek sculpture, the age of Sophocles in Greek drama, the Elizabethan age in English drama, the age of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Italian painting, the age of Wordsworth and Keats in English lyric poetry. Unfortunately, the period of maturity is generally followed by still another period, in which the original impulse overshoots its mark and becomes embodied in distorted, grotesque, and unbeautiful forms. So weak is human nature that it can seldom recognize justly its own value without going further, without precipitating itself into the pitfall of over-valuation, pride, and arrogant self-assertion. The balance of all the elements of art to which idealism aspires is then lost; special elements become preponderant, special effects are made fetishes, and degeneration ensues. Ripeness leads over into decay; wholeness or sanity is lost, and partiality paves the way to disintegration.