an inevitable accompaniment, an indispensable aid to human development.  I will say further, that in a people the capacity to be cultivated involves the capacity, nay, the necessity of art.  And still further, that those nations that have been or are preeminent on the earth, are preeminent in art.  Nay, more, that a nation cannot attain to and maintain eminence without being proficient in art; and that to abstract from a people its artists were not merely to pluck the flowers from its branches; it were to cut off its-deep roots.

Who is the artist?

He who embodies, in whatever mode,—­so that they be visible or audible, and thus find entrance to the mind,—­conceptions of the beautiful, is an artist.  The test and characteristic of the artistic nature are superior sensibility to the beautiful.  Unite to this the faculties and the will to give form to the impressions and emotions that are the fruit of this susceptibility, and you have the artist.  Whether he shall embody his conception in written verse, in marble, in stone, in sound, on the canvas, that will depend on each one’s individual aptitudes.  Generic, common, indispensable to all is the superior sensibility to the beautiful.  In this lies the essence of the artist.

The beautiful and the perfect being, if not identical, in closest consanguinity, the artist’s is an important, a great function.  The artist must receive into his mind, or engender in his mind’s native richness, conceptions of what is most high, most perfect, most beautiful in shape or sound, in thought or feeling; and producing it before his fellow-men, appeal to their sensibility to the beautiful, to their deepest sympathies, to their capacity of being moved by the grandest and the noblest there is in man and nature.  Truly, a mighty part is that of the artist.

Artists are the educators of humanity.  Tutors and professors instruct princes and kings, but poets (and all genuine artists are poets) educate nations.  Take from Greece Homer and Phidias, and Sophocles and Scopas, and the planner of the Parthenon, and you efface Greece from history.  Wanting them, she would not have been the great Greece that we know; she would not have had the vigor of sap, the nervous vitality, to have continued to live in a remote posterity, immortal in the culture, the memories, and the gratitude of men.

So great, so far-stretching, so undying is the power of this exalted class of men, that it were hardly too much to say that had Homer and Phidias never lived, we should not be here today.  If this be deemed extravagant, with confidence I affirm that but for the existence of the greatest artist the world has ever known,—­of him who may be called the chief educator of England,—­but for Shakespeare, we assuredly should not be here to-day doing the good work we are doing.