'You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to see that art shall one day flourish in England. _I too much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far_.' Yet in 1754 Chippendale had published his Cabinet Makers' Guide; and the next fifty years was to see the production of all that beautiful English furniture of which we are so justly proud, and which we forge with such surprising skill. It was the next fifty years that saw the production of the beautiful English pottery which we prize so highly, and it was the next hundred years that was to be the period of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Crome, Cotman, Alfred Stevens, and Turner, who died in 1851, just when the Pre-Raphaelites were supposed to be inaugurating the decay of that which Gray denied the existence, nearly one hundred years before. Though the scope of my discussion is limited to literature and art, it would be paltry to confine our inquiries within limited horizons. Painting and architecture, alas, are not the whole of life; the fine arts are only the flowers of existence; they are useful as humanising elements; but they are not indispensable. That vague community among whom we arbitrarily place those with whom we disagree--the Philistines--get on very well without them. But even Philistines have to reckon with Religion and Science, and in a lesser degree with Philosophy. That powerful trinity affects our every-day life. Philosophy is so cloistered, so difficult to understand, that we seldom hear of its decay; though we are constantly told that some branch of science is being neglected, or owing to a religious revival that its prestige is becoming undermined; its truths are becoming falsehoods. I am not a man of science, not even a student, only a desultory reader. Yet I suggest that, as was pointed out in the case of the fine arts, certain branches of the divine scholarship, if I may call it so, may be arrested temporarily in any development they may have reached. Let us take medicine. Medicine is primarily based upon the study of anatomy or structure--physiology--or the scheme of structure carried out in life; and upon botany and chemistry as representing the vegetable and mineral worlds where the remedies are sought. Anatomy soon reaches a finite position, when a sufficient number of careful dissections has been made; the other divisions used to look like promising endless development; but there is reason to suppose that they too, as far as medicine is concerned, have reached a sterile perfection.