What, then, mean the expressions expert and layman, when applied to æsthetic verdicts? The classes of society, in which preponderating occupation with intellectual problems, continued through several generations, has refined the nervous system and rendered it more sensitive, produce, as a rule, individuals with a feeling for art. These live in large towns, in the centres of art life, they travel, and visit numerous collections, and thus their feeling for art is developed into a wide understanding of it, that studies works of art from the historical standpoint. These are the real experts, so far as there can be any talk of such in æsthetic questions. But these classes of society, these individuals are only to the very smallest extent painters or professional critics, _i.e._, critics writing for the public. To wish to exclude them, on that account, from the expert class is ludicrous presumption of certain persons who, by their own authority, confer this title on themselves. The educated public—the intellectual _élite_—has not the least reason for allowing their opinion on works of art to be dictated to them by painters who may well be daubers or crack-brained fools, or by critics who may be ignorant phrase-mongers. So much for the first question as to the fitness of the so-called layman for criticising works of art. The second question, as to the changes in public opinion about certain works and their authors, is considerably more complex. It is not to be gainsaid that such changes have occurred, but they are much rarer than those would like to make us believe who, from instances of pretended later conversions of originally rebellious taste on the part of contemporaries, hope to succeed in proving that the ugly is beautiful and the beautiful is ugly.