We are prejudiced—we delight in being prejudiced—will continue prejudiced as long as we live, and will entertain none but prejudiced friends. There are things we will believe, and give no reasons for, ever; and things we never will believe, whatever reasons are to be given in their favour. We think the man who said, “Of course, I believe it, if you say you saw it; but I would not believe it if I saw it myself,” used an irresistible argument of good sound prejudice, mixed with discretion. It is better, safer, and honester, to bristle up like a hedgehog, and let him touch who dares, than to sit and be smoothed and smoothed over with oily handling of sophisticated arguments, till every decent palpable roughness of reason is taken from you. Reader, do you like white marble? What a question! you will ask,—do you suppose me to have no eyes? Do not all people covet it—import it from Carrara? Do not sculptors, as sculptors have done in all ages, make statues from it—monuments, ornaments, and costly floors? Of course, everybody loves white marble. Then, reader, if such is your taste, you are a prejudiced ignoramus; you belong to that age “devoid of the capacity to appreciate and the power to execute works of art”—that age which certain persons profess to _illuminate_. You are now, under the new dictators of taste, to know that you had no business to admire white marble,[45]—that you are so steeped in this old prejudice that it will require a long time before you can eradicate this stain of a vile admiration, although your teachers have acquired a true knowledge in an incredible time. You must put yourself under the great colourman of the great Crystal Palace, Mr Owen Jones, who, if he does not put out your eyes in the experiments he will set before you, will at least endeavour to convince you that you are a fool of the first water. But beware how you don his livery of motley. Hear him: “Under this influence (the admiration of white marble), however, we have been born and bred, and it requires time to shake off the trammels which such early education leaves.” You have sillily believed that the Athenians built with marble because of its beauty,—that the Egyptians thought there was beauty in granite. You thought in your historical dream that he who found the city of brick, and left it of marble, had done something whereof he might reasonably boast. You have been egregiously mistaken. If you ever read that the Greeks and Romans, and other people since their times civilised, sent great distances for marble for their palaces and statues, you must put it down in your note-book of new “historic doubts.” You learn a fact you never dreamed of, from Mr Owen Jones. They merely used it (marble) because it lay accidentally at their feet. He puts the richest colouring of his contempt on “the artificial value which white marble has in our eyes.” Learn the real cause of its use: “The Athenians built with marble, because they found it almost beneath