lucidity they are far beyond any usually to be found in essays on Art, and the political significance of the laws thus defined is really, I believe, here for the first time rightly grasped and illustrated. 267. Of these, however, the one whose root is deepest and range widest will be denied by many readers, and doubted by others, so that it may be well to say a word or two farther in its interpretation and defense--the saying, namely, that "faith cannot dwell in hideous towns," and that "familiarity with beauty is a most powerful aid to belief." This is a curious saying, in front of the fact that the primary force of infidelity in the Renaissance times was its pursuit of carnal beauty, and that nowadays (at least, so far as my own experience reaches) more faith may be found in the back streets of most cities than in the fine ones. Nevertheless the saying is wholly true, first, because carnal beauty is not true beauty; secondly, because, rightly judged, the fine streets of most modern towns are more hideous than the back ones; lastly--and this is the point on which I must enlarge--because universally the first condition to the believing there is Order in Heaven is the Sight of Order upon Earth; Order, that is to say, not the result of physical law, but of some spiritual power prevailing over it, as, to take instances from my own old and favorite subject, the ordering of the clouds in a beautiful sunset, which corresponds to a painter's invention of them, or the ordering of the colors on a bird's wing, or of the radiations of a crystal of hoarfrost or of sapphire, concerning any of which matters men, so called of science, are necessarily and forever silent, because the distribution of colors in spectra and the relation of planes in crystals are final and causeless facts, _orders_, that is to say, not _laws_. And more than this, the infidel temper which is incapable of perceiving this spiritual beauty has an instant and constant tendency to delight in the reverse of it, so that practically its investigation is always, by preference, of forms of death or disease and every state of disorder and dissolution, the affectionate analysis of vice in modern novels being a part of the same science. And, to keep to my own special field of study--the order of clouds,--there is a grotesquely notable example of the connection between infidelity and the sense of ugliness in a paper in the last _Contemporary Review_, in which an able writer, who signs Vernon Lee, but whose personal view or purpose remains to the close of the essay inscrutable, has rendered with considerable acuteness and animation the course of a dialogue between one of the common modern men about town who are the parasites of their own cigars and two more or less weak and foolish friends of hesitatingly adverse instincts: the three of them, however, practically assuming their own wisdom to be the highest yet attained by the human race; and