is ever again to be enthroned in that other kind of building, which I think, under some name or other, whether you call it church or hall of reason, or what not, will always be needed; the building in which people meet to forget their own transient personal and family troubles in aspirations for their fellows and the days to come, and which to a certain extent make up to town-dwellers for their loss of field, and river, and mountain.

Well, it seems to me that these two kinds of buildings are all we have really to think of, together with whatsoever outhouses, workshops, and the like may be necessary.  Surely the rest may quietly drop to pieces for aught we care—­unless it should be thought good in the interest of history to keep one standing in each big town to show posterity what strange, ugly, uncomfortable houses rich men dwelt in once upon a time.

Meantime now, when rich men won’t have art, and poor men can’t, there is, nevertheless, some unthinking craving for it, some restless feeling in men’s minds of something lacking somewhere, which has made many benevolent people seek for the possibility of cheap art.

What do they mean by that?  One art for the rich and another for the poor?  No, it won’t do.  Art is not so accommodating as the justice or religion of society, and she won’t have it.

What then? there has been cheap art at some times certainly, at the expense of the starvation of the craftsmen.  But people can’t mean that; and if they did, would, happily, no longer have the same chance of getting it that they once had.  Still they think art can be got round some way or other—­jockeyed, so to say.  I rather think in this fashion:  that a highly gifted and carefully educated man shall, like Mr. Pecksniff, squint at a sheet of paper, and that the results of that squint shall set a vast number of well-fed, contented operatives (they are ashamed to call them workmen) turning crank handles for ten hours a-day, bidding them keep what gifts and education they may have been born with for their—­I was going to say leisure hours, but I don’t know how to, for if I were to work ten hours a-day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure I hope in political agitation, but I fear—­in drinking.  So let us say that the aforesaid operatives will have to keep their inborn gifts and education for their dreams.  Well, from this system are to come threefold blessings—­food and clothing, poorish lodgings and a little leisure to the operatives, enormous riches to the capitalists that rent them, together with moderate riches to the squinter on the paper; and lastly, very decidedly lastly, abundance of cheap art for the operatives or crank turners to buy—­in their dreams.

Well, there have been many other benevolent and economical schemes for keeping your cake after you have eaten it, for skinning a flint, and boiling a flea down for its tallow and glue, and this one of cheap art may just go its way with the others.