Picture galleries have hitherto been thought of chiefly as pleasure places for the educated, or as schools for the student. They can become mission-halls for the degraded. It is easy to arrange visits with a few people to the National Gallery, to the Kensington or Bethnal Green Museums; it is not an unpleasant afternoon’s work to guide little groups of people, just pointing out this beautiful picture, or putting in a few words to explain this or that historical allusion. I once took a girl--a merry lassie, light-hearted, fond of pleasure, but in danger of taking it at the expense of her character--to the National Gallery. The little picture of Raphael’s, where the women acting as the angels stand over the sleeping knight, offering him the protecting shield, opened to her a new truth. Here was a fresh possible relation between man and woman, not the one of rough jokes and doubtful fun, but a new connection not to be despised, either, where the province of the woman was to keep the man safe; a large lesson taught by dumb lips and dead hands. When Sir Richard Wallace lent his pictures to the Bethnal Green Museum, he not only brightened the eyes of many used only to the drear monotony of East London, but he taught one poor wretched woman with a whining baby hanging on her thin breast a large lesson. Dirt on child and mother showed her condition, and was a dreary contrast to the Madonna with lovely crowing baby before whom the little group paused. ‘Ah, yer could easy enough “mother” such a baby as that now,’ was her apologetic remark, showing that the picture had conveyed the rebuke, and that the reverence born of faith in the painter’s heart had not yet finished bearing fruit.