in as ample a measure as the old; invention in still ampler measure, for the Americans are a nation of inventors; but cultivated taste and its special products will long be the appanage of old countries. It will be long before anything of that kind will pass current in the new world without the old world stamp. Adapt your industry in some degree to changed requirements; acquire those finer faculties which the Schools of Design aim at cultivating, but which, in the lucrative production of the coarser goods, have hitherto been comparatively neglected, and you may recover a great American market; it is doubtful whether you will in any other way. Therefore, I repeat, to stint the Art and Science Schools would seem bad policy. I may add that it would be specially bad policy here in Oxford, where, under the auspices of a University which is now extending its care to Art as well as Science, it would seem that the finer industries, such as design applied to furniture, decoration of all kinds, carving, painted glass, bookbinding, ought in time to do particularly well. If you wish to prosper, cultivate your speciality; the rule holds good for cities as well as for men. There are some, perhaps, who dislike to think of Art in connection with anything like manufacture. Let us, then, call it design, and keep the name of art for the higher pursuit. Your Instructor presides, I believe, with success, and without finding his duties clash, over a school, the main object of which is the improvement of manufactures, and another school dedicated to the higher objects of aesthetic cultivation. The name manufacture reminds you of machines, and you may dislike machines and think there is something offensive to artists in their products. Well, a machine does not produce, or pretend to produce, poetry or sculpture; it pretends to clothe thousands of people who would otherwise go naked. It is itself often a miracle of human intellect. It works unrestingly that humanity may have a chance to rest. If it sometimes supersedes higher work, it far more often, by relieving man of the lowest work, sets him free for the higher. Those heaps of stones broken by the hammer of a poor wretch who bends over his dull task through the weary day by the roadside, scantily clad, in sharp frost perhaps or chilling showers, are they more lovely to a painter's eye than if they had been broken, without so much human labour and suffering, by a steam stone-crusher? No one doubts the superior interest belonging to any work however imperfect, of individual mind; but if we were not to use a pair of tongs that did not bear the impress of individual mind, millionaires might have tongs, but the rest of us would put on coals with our fingers. After all, what is a machine but a perfect tool? The Tyrian loom was a machine, though it was worked by hand and not by steam; and if the Tyrian had known the power loom, depend upon it he would have used it.