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purpose we have to be satisfied with examples photographed from 
engravings. 
I have arranged the slides, which are about 100 in number, in 
three main groups. These of course, as I have said, should in a 
systematized plan be again sub-divided. I try first to show you 
the triumph of the fine arts in Egypt, and you can date the 
examples as you will from 2,000 or 1,500 to 600 years before 
Christ. Then, a few only of the highest examples of Greek 
sculpture are shown, and these for all of us, with our past history 
and hereditary ideas coming as they do from Greece, are the 
most impressive and valuable standards of plastic beauty known 
tous. All our main stock of ideas and motives come from the 
Hebrew, Greek, and Roman influences. These standards would 
mean next to nothing to a Japanese, whose wonderful technique 
we admire so much. Then follows the Roman influence, and 
even there, of course, the Greek is predominant, for all their best 
workmen were of that nationality. Aiter this comes that 
extraordinary ten centuries of artistic deadness, when the 
Galilean was conquering and remodelling Eastern Hurope. 
Hardly an example of high and noble workmanship remains of 
all that vast period. Then comes the awakening called the 
Renaissance, or New Birth, which wrought such marvels in the 
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in Italy, and 
ultimately in the more Western countries. On the one hand 
there was the re-discovery of the great Greek and Roman 
classics, and, on the other, a poetic and religious enthusiasm 
seldom equalled. The result was priceless treasures in poetry, 
painting, architecture. Then there was a return wave, not to 
stagnation so much as to conceit and artificiality. Very soon 
came the time when prosperity damped down enthusiasm, when 
wealth and luxury strangled all noble conceptions of religion or 
life, and so forward to our own period when art has become in 
the main the plaything of individuals. There are, for example, 
few great conceptions of our universal brotherhood which result 
in focussing our religious aims, such as we find expressed in 
those marvellous works of art, our cathedrals, works which 
England possesses in such ample quantity and noble quality. 
Our minds and our aims are in other fields. Sometimes it seems 
as if we had lost all sense of united action except for transient 
and material ends. The day may again come when every 
dweller in each of our cities may be proud of its beauty, and 
elevated when he thinks of his citizenship; the day when 
communities will work each for all, and when a rich man’s 
isolation in an expensive, and nearly always an ugly, house will 
be considered to be as ignoble as that a workman should fester 
inaslum. All the great arts, all the great religions have given 
us the ideal. The wonder is that we are so unhappy as to fail in 
its realization. 
