“In the worship of the beautiful, and in that alone, we are inferior to the Greeks. Let us therefore be glad to borrow from them; not slavishly, but with a wise adaptation—not exclusively, but with a cunning selection; in art, as in religion, let us learn to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good—not merely one thing which is good, but all good things—Classicalism, Mediævalism, Modernism—let us have and hold them all in one wide and lusty embrace. Why should the world of art be more narrow, more monotonous, than the world of nature? Did God make all the flowers of one pattern, to please the devotees of the rose or the lily; and did He make all the hills, with the green folds of their queenly mantles, all at one slope, to suit the angleometer of the most mathematical of decorators? I trow not. Let us go and do likewise.” I here take for granted, that what the lecturer meant by “the worship of the beautiful,” is the production and appreciation of works of art in which beauty should be a primary element; and judging from the remains which we possess of such works as were produced by the ancient Grecians, our inferiority to them in these respects cannot certainly be denied. But I must reiterate what I have often before asserted, that it is not by borrowing from them, however cunning our selection, or however wise our adaptations, that this inferiority is to be removed, but by a re-discovery of the science which these ancient artists must have employed in the production of that symmetrical beauty and chaste elegance which pervaded all their works for a period of nearly three hundred years. And I hold, that as in religion, so in art, there is only one truth, a grain of which is worth any amount of philological eloquence. I also take for granted, that what is meant by Classicalism in the above quotation, is the ancient Grecian style of art; by Mediævalism, the semi-barbaric style of the middle ages; and by Modernism, that chaotic jumble of all previous styles and fashions of art, which is the peculiar characteristic of our present school, and which is, doubtless, the result of a system of education based upon plagiarism and mere imitation. Therefore a recommendation to embrace with equal fervour “as good things,” these very opposite artic_isms_ must be a doctrine as mischievous in art as it would be in religion to recommend as equally good things the various _isms_ into which it has also been split in modern times. Now, “the world of nature” and “the world of art” have not that equality of scope which this lecturer on beauty ascribes to them, but differ very decidedly in that particular. Neither will it be difficult to shew why “the world of art _should_ be more narrow than the world of nature”—that it should be thereby rendered more monotonous does not follow.