125. _Dean of St. Paul's._ When you speak of arranging the works of one master consecutively, would you pay any regard or not to the subjects? You must be well aware that many painters, for instance, Correggio, and others, painted very incongruous subjects; would you rather keep them together than disperse the works of those painters to a certain degree according to their subjects?--I would most certainly keep them together. I think it an important feature of the master that he did paint incongruously, and very possibly the character of each picture would be better understood by seeing them together; the relations of each are sometimes essential to be seen. _Mr. Richmond._ Do you think that the preservation of these works is one of the first and most important things to be provided for?--It would be so with me in purchasing a picture. I would pay double the price for it if I thought it was likely to be destroyed where it was. In a note you wrote to me the other day, I find this passage: "The Art of a nation I think one of the most important points of its history, and a part which, if once destroyed, no history will ever supply the place of--and the first idea of a National Gallery is, that it should be a Library of Art, in which the rudest efforts are, in some cases, hardly less important than the noblest." Is that your opinion?--Perfectly. That seems somewhat inconsistent with what I have been saying, but I mean there, the noblest efforts of the time at which they are produced. I would take the greatest pains to get an example of eleventh century work, though the painting is perfectly barbarous at that time. 126. You have much to do with the education of the working classes in Art. As far as you are able to tell us, what is your experience with regard to their liking and disliking in Art--do comparatively uneducated persons prefer the Art up to the time of Raphael, or down from the time of Raphael?--we will take the Bolognese School, or the early Florentine School--which do you think a working man would feel the greatest interest in looking at?--I cannot tell you, because my working men would not be allowed to look at a Bolognese picture; I teach them so much love of detail, that the moment they see a detail carefully drawn, they are caught by it. The main thing which has surprised me in dealing with these men is the exceeding refinement of their minds--so that in a moment I can get carpenters, and smiths, and ordinary workmen, and various classes to give me a refinement which I cannot get a young lady to give me when I give her a lesson for the first time. Whether it is the habit of work which makes them go at it more intensely, or whether it is (as I rather think) that, as the feminine mind looks for strength, the masculine mind looks for delicacy, and when you take it simply, and give it its choice, it will go to the most refined thing, I do not know.