too much in neutral colours; but we are beginning to understand that man does not live on stone and brick alone, but also on taste in arranging and decorating the stone. London, with the exception of some of our monstrous railway bridges and railway stations, begins to look worthy of its position as the centre of the world’s commerce. Our streets have lately put on some stately ‘Sunday clothing’ in terra-cotta, Portland cement, and iron railings. Our glass and china, our furniture and carpets, begin to have more variegated patterns, though I am sorry to hear that foreigners are still generally appointed as the principal modellers. I base this assertion on the Report on the National Competition of the Works of Schools of Art for 1876, in which the examiners say: ‘Our want of that workman-like power over the material, which is so noticeable in all French productions in modelling, is still very conspicuous. As long as this continues a large proportion of the decorative figure or ornamental designs in relief made for the English market will be in the hands of foreign artists.’ The panacea of this evil will and can only be a higher intellectual training, not merely of the faculty of imitating and combining given forms in nature, but of endowing them with ideal beauty, fostered by a correct study of art-history.

There are no illustrations to this work, but I have annexed a long list of illustrated works on art. My aim in teaching, and writing, has been consistently to induce my hearers and readers to think and study for themselves. Bad or even good wood-cuts are by no means essential in art-books, for we possess in the British, Christy’s, and South Kensington Museums such invaluable art-collections, that we may write books without illustrations if we can induce readers and students to verify what we say by a diligent study of these specimens. Theoretical generalisation ought always to precede our special studies. We only then know when we are able to systematise, to group, to draw analogies, or to arrange our details according to some general principle. If we enter on any study without having prepared our mind to grasp the connecting links in an artistic or scientific subject, our knowledge of an incoherent mass of details will only dwarf our understanding, instead of brightening and clearing it, and we shall become technically-trained machines, instead of self-conscious and self-reasoning creators in any branch of art. The Art Library at the South Kensington Museum is, without any exaggeration, the completest in the world; it abounds in the best illustrated works of all nations. Art-books with bad or indifferent illustrations, or even with good illustrations, are not so much needed as art-books with unbiased theories, esthetical principles, and philosophical ideas, which may awaken the power of reasoning in both readers and students. It is only too often the case that, in seeing bad illustrations, the student imagines he knows everything about the work spoken of and produced in outlines. He must, however, go and see for himself. Art has its own fairy domain and its own most catholic realm, in which everyone is welcome who can contribute to the improvement, delight, and happiness of man. To induce readers and students to visit, with some fore-thought and fore-knowledge, our vast and unparalleled art-collections, and to convince them, that to detach the study of art from a correct appreciation of the ideas that engendered its forms, is an impossibility, was the task I set myself in writing the pages of this book.

London: October 1876.

CONTENTS.