Without machines, the members of this School might all be grinding their corn with hand mills, instead of learning Art. Common humanity must use manufactured articles; even uncommon humanity will find it difficult to avoid using them, unless it has the courage of its convictions to the same extent as George Fox, the Quaker, who encased himself in an entire suit of home-made leather, bearing the impress of his individual mind; and defied a mechanical and degenerate world. The only practical question is whether the manufactures shall be good or bad, well-designed or ill; South Kensington answers, that if training can do it, they shall be good and well designed. There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still. I have no instruction to give you, and you would not thank me for wasting your time with rhetorical praise of art, even if I had all the flowers of diction at my command. To me, as an outer barbarian, it seems that some of the language on these subjects is already pretty high pitched. I have thought so even in reading that one of Mr. Addington Symond's most attractive volumes about Italy which relates to Italian art. Art is the interpreter of beauty, and perhaps beauty, if we could penetrate to its essence, might reveal to us something higher than itself. But Art is not religion, nor is connoisseurship priesthood. To happiness Art lends intensity and elevation; but in affliction, in ruin, in the wreck of affection how much can Phidias and Raphael do for you? A poet makes Goethe say to a sceptical and perplexed world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there." It would be a poor refuge for most of us; it was so even for the great Goethe; for with all his intellectual splendour, his character never rose above a grandiose and statuesque self-love; he behaved ill to his country, ill to women. Instead of being religion, Art seems, for its own perfection, to need religion--not a system of dogma, but a faith. This, probably, we all feel when we look at the paintings in the Church of Assisi or in the Arena Chapel at Padua. Perhaps those paintings also gain something by being in the proper place for religious art, a Church. Since the divorce of religious art from religion, it has been common to see a Crucifixion hung over a sideboard. That age was an age of faith; and so most likely was the glorious age of Greek art in its way. Ours is an age of doubt, an age of doubt and of strange cross currents and eddies of opinion, ultra scepticism penning its books in the closet while the ecclesiastical forms of the Middle Ages stalk the streets. Art seems to feel the disturbing influence like the rest of life. Poetry feels it less than other arts, because there is a poetry of doubt and Tennyson is its poet. Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express. In the pictures at our exhibitions