Mr. Sickert you find embedded in the midst of this useful passage. He is a living and genuine painter; and is in that galère, therefore, you can take it, fortuitously. Notice, first, the stuffed birds got hold of by Mr. Fry’s artist “for his queer game of tones and colours.” Mr. Fry’s artist’s “queer game” is the same as Picasso’s ingenious sport. Then we have a luxurious picture of “the collector and the art-dealer” knocking at the artist’s door, and asking to buy his “treasures” (more luxury)--the stuffed birds that have been used in his “queer game”--for _Twenty Times the Price_ paid for them. Next we have a little picture of the young students of the South Kensington School eating buns and milk in the Museum Refreshment Room, and oozing infatuated nothings about the tiles they find there; and going back with naughty, defiant minds to their academic lessons, their dear little heads full of the beautiful tiles they have seen while at lunch. “WE FELL IN LOVE with the beautiful tiles in the South Kensington Refreshment Room,” to parody the famous advertisement. We think of the sugary couple on the walls of the Tube, that utter their melancholy joke and lure you to the saloons of the Hackney Furnishing Company; and we know that Mr. Fry’s picture is as sentimental a one as that--the student “getting excited,” the gush, the buns, and the tiles. The last sentence of the passage I cite prophesies that “the cultured will at some future date conceive a deep admiration for the æsthetic period.” After the tiles of South Kensington Museum, the faded delights of the æsthetic period! Mr. Fry chooses the æsthetic period as the subject of his prophetic vision because of a natural predilection that he no doubt feels for it, because he is a little bit in advance of his time in this respect. He already feels the thrill of such an admiration. But you are to understand first that there is no mode of the human mind, no “period,” no object of any sort or description, that will not have its turn, and be enthused about either by the art-student, or the “cultured”; and secondly that this is very much as it should be, and that this universal tasting and appreciation is all for the best; quite the most suitable way of envisaging the art of painting, sculpture and design.