For as was the land, such was the art of it while folk yet troubled
themselves about such things; it strove little to impress people
either by pomp or ingenuity: not unseldom it fell into commonplace,
rarely it rose into majesty; yet was it never oppressive, never a
slave's nightmare nor an insolent boast: and at its best it had an
inventiveness, an individuality that grander styles have never
overpassed: its best too, and that was in its very heart, was given
as freely to the yeoman's house, and the humble village church, as
to the lord's palace or the mighty cathedral: never coarse, though
often rude enough, sweet, natural and unaffected, an art of peasants
rather than of merchant-princes or courtiers, it must be a hard
heart, I think, that does not love it: whether a man has been born
among it like ourselves, or has come wonderingly on its simplicity
from all the grandeur over-seas. A peasant art, I say, and it clung
fast to the life of the people, and still lived among the cottagers
and yeomen in many parts of the country while the big houses were
being built 'French and fine': still lived also in many a quaint
pattern of loom and printing-block, and embroiderer's needle, while
over-seas stupid pomp had extinguished all nature and freedom, and
art was become, in France especially, the mere expression of that
successful and exultant rascality, which in the flesh no long time
afterwards went down into the pit for ever.

Such was the English art, whose history is in a sense at your doors,
grown scarce indeed, and growing scarcer year by year, not only
through greedy destruction, of which there is certainly less than
there used to be, but also through the attacks of another foe,
called nowadays 'restoration.'

I must not make a long story about this, but also I cannot quite