The seriousness of French teaching has been accompanied by an admirable disinterestedness. Artists of the highest reputation, every hour of whose time was valuable, have been willing to undertake the direction of private schools of painting on terms that barely paid the rent of the studio and the hire of models. There they have given the most sincere and kindly advice to hundreds of students, both Frenchmen and foreigners, from whom they had nothing to expect but a little gratitude, and, perhaps, the reflected honour of having aided one or two youths of genius amidst a crowd of mediocrities. [Sidenote: Extension of Art Teaching in England.] [Sidenote: Results in the Improvement of English Taste and Skill.] In England this kind of teaching is all but unknown, yet a certain culture of the faculties by means of drawing is incomparably more general than it was in the beginning of the century. The total number of “persons taught drawing, painting, or modelling through the agency of the Science and Art Department” is now approaching a million, and this independently of the considerable numbers of young English people who study art privately or in other schools. The result of this culture is already plainly visible in the wonderful improvement of English taste and skill in everything that art can influence, an improvement that nobody could have foreseen in the first half of the present century. [Sidenote: French Efforts in Popular Art Education.] In France, too, great efforts have been made to spread a knowledge of sound elementary drawing amongst the people. It is now a part of the regular course of education for the middle classes in the _lycées_, and there are cheap public drawing schools all over the country. In England this is a new enterprise, in France it is an attempt to recover lost ground; as the French workmen of the eighteenth century were certainly more artistic than their successors, and must have understood design more thoroughly. Even in the Middle Ages, as we know from the excellence of the work left to us, the common workmen cannot have been ignorant of art. [Sidenote: The real Motive.] [Sidenote: France and England not Artistic Nations.] [Sidenote: French Provincial Towns.] [Sidenote: The Argument for the Beautiful.] [Sidenote: Value of Beautiful Surroundings.]