“The intelligent public of this country are daily becoming more alive to the truth, which has long been recognised by other enlightened nations, that the arts of design cannot be properly studied or rightly appreciated by means of insulated specimens alone; that, in order to understand or profit by the great works, either of ancient or modern schools of art, it is necessary to contemplate the genius which produced them, not merely in its final results, but in the mode of its operation—in its rise and progress, as well as in its perfection. A just appreciation of Italian painting can as little be obtained from an exclusive study of the works of Raphael, Titian, or Correggio, as a critical knowledge of English poetry from the perusal of a few of its masterpieces. What Chaucer and Spenser are to Shakespeare and Milton, Giotto and Massaccio are to the great masters of the Florentine school: and a national gallery would be as defective without adequate specimens of both styles of painting, as a national library without specimens of both styles of poetry. In order, therefore, to render the British National Gallery worthy the name it bears, your committee think that the funds appropriated to the enlargement of the collection should be expended with a view not merely of exhibiting to the public beautiful works of art, but of instructing the people in the history of that art, and of the age in which, and the men by whom, those works were produced.” There is but little said here in many words, and that little based upon an erroneous presumption. We do not believe that the “intelligent public” are becoming alive to “the truth,” which is a fallacy, that they cannot profit by great works without having before them the previous failures, experiments, and imbecilities of the earlier practitioners in art. If the public have any intelligence at all, they will appreciate the “Madonna de Sisto,” for instance, without disgusting their eyes with such Byzantine “specimens” as that shown to Mr Curzon in the monastery, where the monk in his strange ignorance inquired if “all women were like that?” Nor is the parallelism between poetry and painting here fortunate. For, besides that books may sleep on shelves and not offend, and pictures (for the purpose intended) must obtrude themselves on the eye, we do not see that Chaucer and Spenser at all bear the relation to Shakespeare and Milton that Giotto and Massaccio do to the great masters of the Florentine school. All these were men of great, mostly independent genius, worthy of galleries and libraries for their own sakes. But they are here placed as screens to hide the chronological deformities behind them. The “not merely exhibiting to the public beautiful works of art” would seem to infer, to give any force to the passage, that not only the painters Giotto and Massaccio had no “beautiful works,” but that Chaucer and Spenser were poor poets, having