APPENDIX. 393 



no professorship, nor school, of art can be of the least use to 

 the general public. No race can understand a visionary land- 

 scape, which blasts its real mountains into ruin, and blackens 

 its river-beds with foam of poison. Nor is it of the least use 

 to exhibit ideal Diana at Kensington, while substantial Phryne 

 may be worshipped in the Strand. The only recovery of our 

 art-power possible, nay, when once we know the full mean- 

 ing of it, the only one desirable, must result from the purifi- 

 cation of the nation's heart, and chastisement of its life : utterly 

 hopeless now, for our adult population, or in our large cities, 

 and their neighbourhood. But, so far as any of the sacred 

 influence of former design can be brought to bear on the 

 minds of the young, and so far as, in rural districts, the first 

 elements of scholarly education can be made pure, the founda- 

 tion of a new dynasty of thought may be slowly laid. I was 

 strangely impressed by the effect produced in a provincial 

 seaport school for children, chiefly of fishermen's families, by 

 the gift of a little coloured drawing of a single figure from 

 the Paradise of Angelico in the Academia of Florence. The 

 drawing was wretched enough seen beside the original : I had 

 only bought it from the poor Italian copyist for charity ; but, 

 to the children, it was like an actual glimpse of heaven ; ijiey 

 rejoiced in it with pure joy, and their mistress thanked me 

 for it more than if I had sent her a whole library of good 

 books. Of such copies, the grace-giving industry of young 

 girls, now worse than lost in the spurious charities of the ba- 

 zaar, or selfish ornamentations of the drawing-room, might, in 

 a year's time, provide enough for every dame-school in Eng- 

 land ; and a year's honest work of the engravers employed on 

 our base novels, might represent to our advanced students 

 every frescoed legend of philosophy and morality extant in 

 Christendom. 



For my own part, I have no purpose, in what remains to 

 me of opportunity, either at Oxford or elsewhere, to address 

 any farther course of instruction towards the development of 

 existing schools. After seeing the stream of the Teviot as 

 black as ink, and a putrid carcase of a sheep lying in the dry 

 channel of the Jed, under Jedburgh Abbey, (the entire strength 



