What may be the reason why architecture, sculpture, painting, and even poetry--_i.e._, the combination of stone, brick, marble, metal, colours, and, lastly, of metrical forms of words--should all suffer by the advance of our (so-called) civilization and education, is still a mystery; but few will be found to doubt the fact in detail, though they may deny the general formula. Perhaps our self-consciousness as to our great virtues, our "progress," our knowledge, the learning of the reason of our work, the introversion of our present moods of thought, check the development of an idea, even if we may be fortunate enough to get hold of one. Self-consciousness is fatal to art; there is a certain spontaneity of utterance--singing, as the birds sing, because they cannot help it--"composing," almost as the mountains and clouds "compose," by reason of their existence itself, not because they want to make a picture,--which produces natural work, grown out of the man and the requirements of his nature, to which it seems, with very rare exceptions, that we cannot now attain. In sculpture, a modern R.A. has acquired ten times as much anatomy as Phidias: dissection was unknown, and not permitted, by the Greeks. Chemistry has produced for the painter colours which Raphael (luckily for us) never dreamed of. Yet one cannot help wondering at the strange daring which permits the honourable society at Burlington House to hang yearly the works of the ancient masters of the craft on the same walls where their own productions are to figure a few weeks later, as if to inform the world most impressively and depressingly from how far we have fallen in pictorial art; to string up our taste, as it were, to concert pitch--to give the key-note of true excellence, in order to mark the depth to which we have sunk. We now teach drawing diligently in all European countries, and are surprised that we get no Michelangelos. Did Masaccio go to a school of design, or Giotto learn "free-hand" manipulation? Education, as it is generally defined--meaning thereby a knowledge of the accumulation of facts discovered by other people--is good for the general public, for ordinary humanity, but not for original minds, except so far as it saves them time and trouble by preventing them from reinventing what has been already done by others. True, there can be but few "inventors" (in the old Italian sense of creators) in the world at any one moment, and training must, it will be said, be carried on for the use of the many; but one might still plead for a certain elasticity in our teaching, a margin left for free-will among the few who will ever be able to use it. And, meantime, it is allowable to lament over the number of arts we have lost, or are in danger of losing, which can only be practised by the few--whose number seems ever to be diminishing, under our generalizing processes of turning out as many minds of the same pattern as if we wanted nail-heads or patent screws by the million.