Nor need we have any fear but that in the long run things will come right in this matter.  In this, however, as in most things, truth is the daughter of time.  The moral sense and reason is so strong a force in the calm and disinterested judgments of mankind, that it must and will prevail:  its verdict may be some time in coming, but come it will, sooner or later, and will ultimately have things all its own way.  For the aesthetic conscience is probably the most impartial and inexorable of the human powers; and this, because it acts most apart from any regards of self-interest or any apprehension of consequences.  The elections of taste are in a special sort exempt both from hope of profit and from fear of punishment.  And man’s sense of the Beautiful is so much in the keeping of his moral reason,—­secret keeping indeed, and all the surer for being secret,—­that it cannot be bribed or seduced to a constant admiration of any beauty where the moral element is wanting, or even where it is excluded from its rightful place.  In other words, the law of goodness or of moral rectitude is so closely interwoven with the nature and truth of things, that the human mind will not set up its rest with any workmanship in Art where that law is either set at nought or discrowned.  Its natural and just prerogatives will assert themselves in spite of us; and their triumph is assured the moment we go to resisting them.  That which appeals merely to our sense of the Beautiful, and which has nothing to recommend it but as it touches that sense, must first of all have the moral element of beauty, and this too in the foremost place, else it stands no chance of a permanent hold upon us.

It is indeed true that works of art, or things claiming to be such, in which this law of natural proportion is not respected or not observed, may have a transient popularity and success:  nay, their success may be the greater, or at least the louder and more emphatic, for that very disproportion:  the multitude may, and in fact generally do, go after such in preference to that which is better.  And even men not exactly of the multitude, but still without the preparation either of a natural or a truly educated taste,—­men in whom the sense of beauty is outvoiced by cravings for what is sensational, and who are ever mistaking the gratification of their lower passions for the satisfaction of their aesthetic conscience;—­such men may be and often are won to a passing admiration of works in which the moral law of Art is plainly disregarded:  but they seldom tie up with them; indeed their judgment never stays long enough in one place to acquire any weight; and no man of true judgment in such things ever thinks of referring to their preference but as a thing to be avoided.  With this spirit of ignorant or lawless admiration the novelty of yesterday is eclipsed by the novelty of to-day; other things being equal, the later instance of disproportion always outbids the earlier.  For so this spirit is ever