Manufacturing an article, (whatever be the real derivation of the word, but) meaning the use of machinery for the multiplication of the greatest number of articles at the least cost, however admirable for the comfort of the million, is evidently fatal to art. When each bit of ironwork, every hinge, every lock scutcheon, was hammered out with care and consideration by the individual blacksmith, even if he were but an indifferent performer, it bore the stamp of the thought of a man's mind directing his hand; now there is only the stamp of a machine running the metal into a mould. When every bit of decorative wood-work was "all made out of the carver's brain,"--when the embroidery of the holiday shirt of a boatman of "Chios' rocky isle" took half a lifetime to devise and stitch, and was intended to last for generations of wearers, art found a way, however humble, through nimble fingers interpreting the fancies of the individual brain. "Fancy work," as an old Hampshire woman called her stitching of the fronts and backs of the old-fashioned smock-frocks, each one differing from the one she made before, as her "fancy" led. It was always interesting, and almost always beautiful. Now the hinges are cast by the ton, all of one pattern; fortunate, indeed, if the original be a good one (a very hopeful supposition!). The sewing-machine repeats its monotonous curves of embroidery; the wood-carving is the result of skilfully-arranged knives and wheels worked by steam, which only execute forms adapted for them. The initial thought of their designer must be, not what is in itself desirable, but that which the machine can best produce. What is right in a particular place, is the natural object of the workman artist; how to use what has been already cast or stamped, is the object of the present ordinary builder; and what he calls "symmetry"--_i.e._, monotony, every line repeated _ad nauseam_--is the result his education aims at. Symmetry, in the sense of the repetition of the infinite variety of exquisitely modulated curves in the two outlines of the human body, is beautiful and harmonious; but there is neither beauty nor harmony in the repetition of the self-same horizontal and perpendicular lines of windows and doors in a London street. A feeling of what in music are called "contrary motion," "oblique motion," is all required in the impression produced by really fine architecture. Yet, if the ordinary builder is asked to vary his hideous row of houses by an additional window or a higher chimney, he exclaims with horror at such a violation of "symmetry," his sole rule of beauty being that all should look alike.