165. It will, assuredly, pervert taste in this essential point, that the polite ranks of the nation will come to think the _living_ creature and its dress exempt from the highest laws of taste; and that while a man or woman must, indeed, be seen dressed or undressed with dignity, in marble, they may be dressed or undressed, if not with _in_dignity, at least, with less than dignity, in the ball-room, and the street. Now the law of all living art is that the man and woman must be more beautiful than their pictures, and their pictures as decorous as the living man or woman; and that real dress, and gesture, and behaviour, should be more graceful than any marble or colour can effect similitude of. 166. Thus the idea of a different dress in art and reality, of which that of art is to be the ideal one, perverts taste in dress; and the study of the nude which is rarely seen, as much perverts taste in art. Of all pieces of art that I know, skilful in execution, and not criminal in intention;--without any exception, quite the most vulgar, and in the solemn sense of the word, most abominable, are the life studies which are said to be the best made in modern times,--those of Mulready, exhibited as models in the Kensington Museum. 167. How far the study of the seldom-seen nude leads to perversion of morals, I will not, to-day, inquire; but I beg you to observe that even among the people where it was most frank and pure, it unquestionably led to evil far greater than any good which demonstrably can be traced to it. Scarcely any of the moral power of Greece depended on her admiration of beauty, or strength in the body. The power of Greece depended on practice in military exercise, involving severe and continual ascetic discipline of the senses; on a perfect code of military heroism and patriotic honour; on the desire to live by the laws of an admittedly divine justice; and on the vivid conception of the presence of spiritual beings. The mere admiration of physical beauty in the body, and the arts which sought its expression, not only conduced greatly to the fall of Greece, but were the cause of errors and crimes in her greatest time, which must for ever sadden our happiest thoughts of her, and have rendered her example almost useless to the future. 168. I have named four causes of her power; discipline of senses; romantic ideal of heroic honour; respect for justice; and belief in God. There was a fifth--the most precious of all--the belief in the purity and force of life in man; and that true reverence for domestic affection, which, in the strangest way, being the essential strength of every nation under the sun, had yet been lost sight of as the chief element of Greek virtue, though the Iliad itself is nothing but the story of the punishment of the rape of Helen; and though every Greek hero called himself chiefly by his paternal name,--Tydides, rather than Diomed;--Pelides, rather than Achilles.