and beauty amongst us, and whose pictures, painted amidst
difficulties that none but a painter can know, show qualities of
mind unsurpassed in any age--these great men have but a narrow
circle that can understand their works, and are utterly unknown to
the great mass of the people: civilisation is so much against them,
that they cannot move the people.

Therefore, looking at all this, I cannot think that all is well with
the root of the tree we are cultivating. Indeed, I believe that if
other things were but to stand still in the world, this improvement
before mentioned would lead to a kind of art which, in that
impossible case, would be in a way stable, would perhaps stand still
also. This would be an art cultivated professedly by a few, and for
a few, who would consider it necessary--a duty, if they could admit
duties--to despise the common herd, to hold themselves aloof from
all that the world has been struggling for from the first, to guard
carefully every approach to their palace of art. It would be a pity
to waste many words on the prospect of such a school of art as this,
which does in a way, theoretically at least, exist at present, and
has for its watchword a piece of slang that does not mean the
harmless thing it seems to mean--art for art's sake. Its fore-
doomed end must be, that art at last will seem too delicate a thing
for even the hands of the initiated to touch; and the initiated must
at last sit still and do nothing--to the grief of no one.

Well, certainly, if I thought you were come here to further such an
art as this I could not have stood up and called you FRIENDS; though
such a feeble folk as I have told you of one could scarce care to
call foes.