On the unconscious development of mediaeval architecture, due to no one man, but to a universal interest in and appreciation of the art, it is unnecessary to dwell. Nor need we for present purposes seek further illustration farther afield. Let us take time now to look more narrowly at the art of to-day, and try to mark the different shapes it has taken with different nations. The most decided school is in France: her artists, many in number, confine, whether involuntarily or not, their individual differences within sharply-marked and easily-noted limits. In Germany the schools are two--one of so-called historical painting at Munich, one of what we may name domestic painting at Duesseldorf. This last may be put on one side as having no specially obtrusive characteristics, and by German pictures will be meant those of the Munich and Vienna type, whether actually from the studios of Munich and Vienna or not. In English contemporary art can one pretend to find a school at all in any true sense of the word? What we do find is a very widespread art-literature and talk of art, a large number of working artists varying in temperament, and a vast horde of amateurs, who are not content to be patrons, but yearn also to be practisers of art. In England theories of art are more carefully discussed and more widely diffused than they are in any other country. But they are theories of an essentially untechnical, amateurish, literary kind. The English critic calls all law and philosophy, all rules of morals and manners, of religion and political economy and science and scientific aesthetics, to aid his critical faculty when he needs must speak of pictures. In Germany there is also much theorizing, but of a different kind. It is not so much the whole physical and psychical cosmos that the German critic studies as the past history of art in its most recondite phases and most subtle divergences. Upon this he draws for information as to the value of the work before him. On the other hand, we shall find French art-criticism to be almost purely technical. As the critics differ, so do the criticised by the natural law of national coherence. An English painter is apt to be primarily an embodied theory of one sort or another; which theory is more or less directly connected with his actual work as a painter. A German painting is apt to be scientifically composed on theory also, but a theory drawn from the study of art _per se_, not of the whole world external to art. The work of a Frenchman, like the criticism of his commentator, is primarily technical.