APPENDIX. 391 



road born and bred, which drags itself about the black world 

 it has withered under its breath, in one eternal grind and 

 shriek, gobbling, staring, chattering, giggling, tram- 

 pling out every vestige of national honour and domestic peace, 

 wherever it sets the staggering hoof of it ; incapable of read- 

 ing, of hearing, of thinking, of looking, capable only of 

 greed for money, lust for food, pride of dress, and the pru- 

 rient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics last an- 

 nounced by the newsmonger, and the religion last rolled by 

 the chemist into electuary for the dead. 



In the miserably competitive labour of finding new stimu- 

 lus for the appetite daily more gross of this tyrannous mob, 

 we may count as lost, beyond any hope, the artists who are 

 dull, docile, or distressed enough to submit to its demands ; 

 and we may count the dull and the distressed by myriads ; 

 and among the docile, many of the best intellects we possess. 

 The few who have sense and strength to assert their own place 

 and supremacy, are driven into discouraged disease by their 

 isolation, like Turner and Blake ; the one abandoning the de- 

 sign of his ' Liber Studiorum ' after imperfectly and sadly, 

 against total public neglect, carrying it forward to what it is, 

 monumental, nevertheless, in landscape engraving ; the 

 other producing, with one only majestic series of designs from 

 the book of Job, nothing for his life's work but coarsely iri- 

 descent sketches of enigmatic dream. 



And, for total result of our English engraving industry dur- 

 ing the last hundred and fifty years, I find that practically at 

 this moment I cannot get a single piece of true, sweet, and 

 comprehensible art, to place for instruction in any children's 

 school ! I can get, for ten pounds apiece, well-engraved por- 

 traits of Sir Joshua's beauties showing graceful limbs through 

 flowery draperies ; I can get dirt-cheap any quantity of 

 Dutch flats, ditches, and hedges, enlivened by cows chewing 

 the cud, and dogs behaving indecently ; I can get heaps upon 

 heaps of temples, and forums, and altars, arranged as for 

 academical competition, round seaports, with curled-up ships 

 that only touch the water with the middle of their bottoms. 

 I can get, at the price of lumber, any quantity of British 



