building a wall, nor for contriving windows so as to exclude light, air, and earth.  As much as any of you, I am for every man’s sitting under his own vine, and for his training, pruning, and eating its fruit how he pleases.  Let the artist paint, write, or carve, what and how he wills, teach the world through sense or through thought,—­I will not dissent; I have no patent to entitle me to do so; nay, I will be thoroughly satisfied with whatsoever he does, so long as it is pure, unsensual, and earnestly true.  But, as the mental is the peculiar feature that places man apart from and above animals,—­so ought all that he does to be apart from and above their nature; especially in the fine arts, which are the intellectual perfection of the intellectual.  And nothing short of this intellectual perfection,—­however much they may be pictures, poems, statues, or music,—­can rank such works to be works of Fine Art.  They may have merit,—­nay, be useful, and hence, in some sort, have a purpose:  but they are as much works of Fine Art as Babel was the Temple of Solomon.

Sophon. And man can be made to understand these truths—­can be drawn to crave for and love the fine arts:  it is only to take him in hand as we would take some animal—­tenderly using it—­entreating it, as it were, to do its best—­to put forth all its powers with all its capable force and beauty.  Nor is it so very difficult a task to raise, in the low, conceptions of things high:  the mass of men have a fine appreciation of God and his goodness:  and as active, charitable, and sympathetic a nurture in the beautiful and true as they have given to them in religion, would as surely and swiftly raise in them an equally high appreciation of the fine arts.  But, if the artist would essay such a labour, he must show them what fine art is:  and, in order to do this effectually, as an architect clears away from some sacred edifice which he restores the shambles and shops, which, like filthy toads cowering on a precious monument, have squatted themselves round its noble proportions; so must he remove from his art-edifice the deformities which hide—­the corruptions which shame it.

Christian. How truly Sophon speaks a retrospective look will show.  The disfigurements which both he and I deplore are strictly what he compared them to; they are shambles and shops grafted on a sacred edifice.  Still, indigenous art is sacred and devoted to religious purposes:  this keeps it pure for a time; but, like a stream travelling and gathering other streams as it goes through wide stretches of country to the sea, it receives greater and more numerous impurities the farther it gets from its source, until, at last, what was, in its rise, a gentle rilling through snows and over whitest stones, roars into the ocean a muddy and contentious river.  Men soon long to touch and taste all that they see; savage-like, him whom to-day they deem a god and worship, they on the morrow get an appetite for and kill, to eat