I referred, but now, to the effort we are making to improve the designs of our manufactures.  Within certain limits I believe this improvement may indeed take effect:  so that we may no more humour momentary fashions by ugly results of chance instead of design; and may produce both good tissues, of harmonious colours, and good forms and substance of pottery and glass.  But we shall never excel in decorative design.  Such design is usually produced by people of great natural powers of mind, who have no variety of subjects to employ themselves on, no oppressive anxieties, and are in circumstances either of natural scenery or of daily life, which cause pleasurable excitement. We cannot design because we have too much to think of, and we think of it too anxiously.  It has long been observed how little real anxiety exists in the minds of the partly savage races which excel in decorative art; and we must not suppose that the temper of the middle ages was a troubled one, because every day brought its dangers or its changes.  The very eventfulness of the life rendered it careless, as generally is still the case with soldiers and sailors.  Now, when there are great powers of thought, and little to think of, all the waste energy and fancy are thrown into the manual work, and you have as much intellect as would direct the affairs of a large mercantile concern for a day, spent all at once, quite unconsciously, in drawing an ingenious spiral.

Also, powers of doing fine ornamental work are only to be reached by a perpetual discipline of the hand as well as of the fancy; discipline as attentive and painful as that which a juggler has to put himself through, to overcome the more palpable difficulties of his profession.  The execution of the best artists is always a splendid tour-de-force, and much that in painting is supposed to be dependent on material is indeed only a lovely and quite inimitable legerdemain.  Now, when powers of fancy, stimulated by this triumphant precision of manual dexterity, descend uninterruptedly from generation to generation, you have at last, what is not so much a trained artist as a new species of animal, with whose instinctive gifts you have no chance of contending.  And thus all our imitations of other peoples’ work are futile.  We must learn first to make honest English wares, and afterward to decorate them as may please the then approving Graces.

Secondly—­and this is an incapacity of a graver kind, yet having its own good in it also—­we shall never be successful in the highest fields of ideal or theological art.

For there is one strange, but quite essential, character in us—­ever since the Conquest, if not earlier:—­a delight in the forms of burlesque which are connected in some degree with the foulness in evil.  I think the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible temper, is that of Chaucer; and you will find that, while it is for the most part full of thoughts of beauty, pure and wild like that of