We have therefore to lay down this rule: that, in order to comprehend a work of art, an artist or a group of artists, we must clearly comprehend the general social and intellectual condition of the times to which they belong. Herein is to be found the final explanation; herein resides the primitive cause determining all that follows it. This truth, gentlemen, is confirmed by experience. In short, if we pass in review the principal epochs of the history of art, we find that the arts appear and disappear along with certain accompanying social and intellectual conditions. For example, the Greek tragedy--that of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides--appears at the time when the Greeks were victorious over the Persians; at the heroic era of small republican cities, at the moment of the great struggle by which they acquired their independence and established their ascendency in the civilized world; and we see it disappearing along with this independence and this vigor when a degeneracy of character and the Macedonian conquest delivered Greece over to strangers. It is the same with Gothic architecture, developing along with the definitive establishment of feudalism in the semi-renaissance of the eleventh century at the period when society, delivered from brigands and Normans, began to consolidate, and disappearing at the period when the military system of petty independent barons, with the manners and customs growing out of it vanished near the end of the fifteenth century, on the advent of modern monarchies. It is the same with Dutch painting, which flourished at the glorious period when, through firmness and courage, Holland succeeded in freeing herself from Spanish rule, combated England with equal power, and became the richest, freest, most industrious, and most prosperous state in Europe: and we see it declining at the commencement of the eighteenth century, when Holland, fallen into a secondary rank, leaves the first to England, reducing itself to a well-ordered, safely administered, quiet, commercial banking-house, in which man, an honest _bourgeois,_ could live at ease, exempt from every great ambition and every grand emotion. It is the same, finally, with French tragedy appearing at the period when a noble and well-regulated monarchy, under Louis XIV., established the empire of decorum, the life of the court, "the pomp and circumstance" of society, and the elegant domestic phases of aristocracy; disappearing when the social rule of nobles and the manners of the antechamber were abolished by the Revolution.