392 ARIADNE FLORENT1NA. 



squires flourishing whips and falling over hurdles ; and, in 

 suburban shops, a dolorous variety of widowed mothers nurs- 

 ing babies in a high light, with the Bible on a table, and 

 baby's shoes on a chair. Also, of cheap prints, painted red 

 and blue, of Christ blessing little children, of Joseph and his 

 brethren, the infant Samuel, or Daniel in the lion's den, the 

 supply is ample enough to make every child in these islands 

 think of the Bible as a somewhat dull story-book, allowed on 

 Sunday ; but of trained, wise, and worthy art, applied to 

 gentle purposes of instruction, no single example can be found 

 in the shops of the British printseller or bookseller. And 

 after every dilettante tongue in European society has filled 

 drawing-room and academy alike with idle clatter concerning 

 the divinity of Raphael and Michael Angelo, for these last 

 hundred years, I cannot at this instant, for the first school 

 which I have some power of organizing under St. George's 

 laws, get a good print of Raphael's Madonna of the tribune, 

 or an ordinarily intelligible view of the side and dome of St. 

 Peter's ! 



And there are simply no words for the mixed absurdity and 

 wickedness of the present popular demand for art, as shown 

 by its supply in our thoroughfares. Abroad, in the shops of 

 the Rue de Rivoli, brightest and most central of Parisian 

 streets, the putrescent remnant of what was once Catholicism 

 promotes its poor gilded pedlars' ware of nativity and cruci- 

 fixion into such honourable corners as it can find among the 

 more costly and studious illuminations of the brothel : and 

 although, in Pall Mall, and the Strand, the large-margined 

 Landseer, Stanfield, or Turner-proofs, in a few stately win- 

 dows, still represent, uncared-for by the people, or inaccessible 

 to them, the power of an English school now wholly perished, 

 these are too surely superseded, in the windows that stop 

 the crowd, by the thrilling attraction with which Dore, Gerome, 

 and Tadema have invested the gambling table, the duelling 

 ground, and the arena ; or by the more material and almost tan- 

 gible truth with which the apothecary-artist stereographs the 

 stripped actress, and the railway mound. 



Under these conditions, as I have now repeatedly asserted, 



