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ten, and well-lighted, as that at Kensington is, for the convenience 
of the working classes. I will not go more into detail at present. 
All that I need say just now is to assure you that such a museum 
might be started with limited funds. Casts of the most magnifi- 
cent statues in the world may be procured for very little and 
equally faithful reproductions of drawings by the greatest masters 
are now extremely cheap. As for engravings more than two 
thousand of the finest pictures in the Louvre have been engraved 
at the cost of the French Government which sells good impres- 
sions at the most moderate price for the encouragement of art. 
The French provincial museums are by no means perfect as 
models, but they generally contain casts from the antique, some 
good original drawings, some autotype photographs from other 
drawings by great masters, besides a quantity of pictures, amongst 
which may be found a few, if only a few, really good ones. 
Almost every French provincial town of any importance has its 
art-museum. I do not wish for one moment to exaggerate the 
value of these little provincial collections which are generally got 
together merely by haphazard, as gifts happen to come in from the 
Government or from private individuals. There is a great deal 
of inferior and even positively bad art in them, but in spite of 
all that can be said against them the fact remains that a French- 
man at a distance from the capital can get some notion of what 
art is without travelling very far to see it. There is no part of 
England in which art museums, judiciously organised, would be 
more generally appreciated or more useful than in the manufac- 
turing districts, because the connection between decorative art 
and manufactures is so very close. The worst bit of calico 
printing that was ever executed is still a very near relative of 
figure drawing, and leads you up straight to Raphael himself. 
Whenever a cabinet-maker carves an ornament on a sideboard 
he is doing something in which the greatest artist who ever lived 
would have taken a keen and earnest interest, something which 
is related to all the decorative sculpture in the world, which 
in its turn is related both to figure sculpture and architecture. 
The fact is that however various may be the manifestations of 
' what we call art, it all hangs together in such a way that an 
intelligent man, in whatever station of life he may be, if only 
he has to do work in the slightest degree either decorative in 
itself, or representative of anything in nature, is sure to take 
some interest in an art museum, and to be able to derive benefit 
from it. There is another thing to be said in favour of such 
collections as the one I propose. The sight of beautiful things 
is often very efficacious in relieving feelings of depression which 
many people try to relieve by means that only increase the evil. 
Life in a manufacturing town in the north of England is often 
depressing from the state of the climate and atmosphere. The 
