Ideal upon which it can and should be modelled. It is this Ideal which it is the function of the Artist--which it is the function of this Society--to discover and to express, in great things as in small, in small as in great: and the Ideal, expressed, is then as a great Light to those who sit in darkness; it is a light towards which the soul of Actuality turns; it is that which, aspired to, gives to an age dignity and immortality, and converts the work of the hand and brain from work that is sordid and mean, to work that is imaginative and noble.' But the claim does not rest on unpublished records alone. This I think will be apparent if attention be given to the one series of Lectures which has survived their delivery, and been published. I refer to 'Art and Life, and the Building and Decoration of Cities,' a title which of itself carries the scope of the Society beyond all the possible Exhibits of an Exhibition. The object of these Lectures is thus explicitly stated by the Lecturer on 'Art and Life,' which introduces the series, and his statement is borne witness to throughout by all the other speakers. The statement to which I refer is as follows: 'I now begin the first of a series of Lectures having for their object generally the extension of the conception of Art, and more especially the application of the idea of Beauty to the organization and decoration of our greater cities.' And of his own Lecture he says: 'I desire to extend the conception of Art, and to apply it to life as a whole; or, inversely, to make the whole of life, in all its grandeur, as well as in all its delightful detail, the object of the action of Art and Craft.' And in the course of it the Lecturer thus defined what seemed to him the function of art in this extended conception of its meaning. 'Art implies a certain lofty environment, and is itself an adjustment to that environment of all that can be done by mankind within it. Art as a great function of human imagination is not the creation of isolated objects of beauty, though isolated objects of beauty may indeed be created by art, and, in themselves, resume all that is beautiful, orderly, restful, and stable in the artist's conception of that environment. Still less is it, what some may seem to imagine, the objects of beauty themselves. Art is, or should be, alive, alive and a universal stimulus. It is that spirit of order and seemliness, of dignity and sublimity, which, acting in unison with the great procession of natural forces in their own orderly evolution, tends to make out of a chaos of egotistic passions, a great power of disinterested social action; which tends to make out of the seemingly meaningless satisfaction of our daily and annual needs, a beautiful exercise of our innumerable gifts of fancy and invention, an exercise which may be its own exceeding great reward, and come to seem to be indeed _the_ end for which the needs were made.'