Take, to begin with, the earliest instruments by which primitive man began raising himself from the ruck of material conditions; his weapons--first of the chase, and then of war. No sooner had he proved their use than he began to ornament them--to make them records, trophies, and so--objects of beauty. He cannot stop from doing so; his delight in the skill of his hands breaks out into ornament. It is the same with the arts of peace, the work of the woman-primitive--she moulds a pot, or weaves a square of material, and into it--the moment she has accomplished the rudiments--goes pattern, beauty, something additional and memorable that is not for use material, but for use spiritual--pleasure, delight. And that quite simple example, from a time when man was living the life, as we should now regard it, of a harried and hunted beast--with his emergence from surrounding perils scarcely yet assured to him--goes on consistently up and up the scale of human evolution; and the more strongly it gets to be established in social institutions, the more noble is likely to be the form of civilization which enshrines it. And the less it shows, the less is that form of civilization likely to be worthy of preservation, or its products of permanent value to the human race. It is not the millionaire who leaves his mark on the world so that hereafter men are glad when they name him; it is the “maker” who has turned uses into delights; not the master of the money-market, but the Master of Arts. The nearest thing we have on earth to that immortality which so many look to as the human goal lies in those forms of ornament--of embellishment over and above mere use--which man’s genius has left to us in architecture, poetry, music, sculpture, and painting. Nothing that stops at utility has anything like the same value, for the revelation of the human spirit, as that which finds its setting in the Arts--the sculptures of Egypt and Greece, the Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Italy, the paintings of the Renaissance, the masterpieces of Bach and Beethoven, the poems and writings all down the ages of men comparatively poor in monetary wealth, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice in their power to communicate their own souls to things material and to leave them there, when their own bodies have turned to dust. In the embellishment they added to life they bestowed on the age in which they lived its most significant commentary. There you will find, as nowhere else, the meaning and the interpretation of the whole social order to which these forms were as flower and fruit. Ancient Greece is not represented to us to-day by its descendants in the flesh (as an expression of that life they have ceased to exist) but by those works of art and philosophy through which men--many now nameless--made permanent the vision of delight to which, in the brief life of the flesh, they had become heirs. The self-realisation of that age--all the best of it that we