It is but a few decades since the greater portion of all intellectual or inventive effort was devoted to setting off rank, to exalting the exalted, and, by contrast, still further degrading the lowly. What were the glorious works of those mediaeval artists in stone and canvas, in orfevery and silver, in marble and bronze, nielloed salvers, golden chasing, laces as from fairy-land, canopies, garments and gems? All beautiful patents of rank, marks to honor wealthy rank--nothing more, save that and the imperishable proof of genius, which is ever lovely, as a slave or free. But where goes the inventive talent now? Beaumarchais worked for a year to make a watch which only 'the king' could buy. Had he lived to-day he would have striven to invent some improvement which should be found in every man's watch. It 'pays better,' in a word, to invent for the poor many than for the rich few--and invention has found this out. Something which must be had in every cottage,--soap for the million, medicine for the masses, cheap churns, cheap clocks, always something of which one can sell many and much,--such are the objects which claim the labor of genius now. Fools grieve that Art is dead; 'lives at best only in imitation;' and that we have chanced on a godless, humdrum, steam and leather age--one of prose and dust, facts and factories. Sometimes come gasping efforts--sickly self-persuasions that all is not so bad as it seems. Mr. Slasher of the Sunday paper is quite certain that the Creek Indian Girl statue is far superior to anything antique, while Crasher, just back from Europe, shakes his head, and assures the younger hadjis--expectant that the old masters are old humbugs, and that it is generally understood to be so now in France--you can get better pictures at half price any day in the shops. It will not do. The art of small details, the art of pieces and bits, went out with the last architecture. It went over to the people, and from them a higher Art will yet bloom again in a beauty, a freshness, and grandeur never before dreamed of. It will live again in Nature. For it is towards Nature that progress tends--towards real beauty, and not towards the false 'ideal.'