first time in their lives.  Well, what Turner and other painters of his generation did for landscape, had had to be done for men and women in earlier days by earlier generations of artists.  The Greeks were the first, in their sculpture, to show the wonderful beauty of the human form; till their day people had not recognised what to us now seems obvious.  No doubt they had thought one person pretty and another handsome, but they had not known that the human figure was essentially a glorious thing till the Greek sculptors showed them.  Another thing painters have taught the world is the beauty of atmosphere.  Formerly no one seems to have noticed how atmosphere affects every object that is seen through it.  The painters had to show us that it is so.  After we had seen the effect of atmosphere in pictures we began to be able to see for ourselves in nature, and thus a whole group of new pleasures in views of nature was opened up to us.

Away back in the Middle Ages, six hundred and more years ago, folks had far less educated eyes than we possess to-day.  They looked at nature more simply than we do and saw less in it.  So they were satisfied with pictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do without.

But painting does not only concern itself with representing the world we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold.  It concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe.  Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy play about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancy get mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and of fact, and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins.  The fancies of people are very different at different times, and you can’t understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the fancies of the old painters.  To do that you must know something about the way they lived and the things they believed, and what they hoped for and what they were afraid of.

Here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an old account book.  A certain Count of Savoy owned the beautiful Castle of Chillon, which you have perhaps seen, on the shores of the Lake of Geneva.  But he could not be happy, because he and the people about him thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars a basilisk lived—­a very terrible dragon—­and they all went in fear of it.  So the Count paid a brave mason a large sum of money (and the payment is solemnly set down in his account book) to break a way into this hole and turn the basilisk out; and I have no doubt that he and his people were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basilisk was found.  Folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that, must have gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particular emotion.  A picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than it would to us.  So if we are really to understand old pictures, we must begin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them, and of the people they were painted for.  You see how much study that means for any one who wants to understand all the art of all the world.