politics and commerce interfered.  The intensely artificial painting of France, to which Diderot objected so much, had become perfect and sterile.  Then (happily or unhappily, in whichever direction your tastes lie) the French Revolution, by a pathetic misunderstanding of classical ideals, paved the way for the naturalism of the misnamed Romantic school.  We were told, a short time ago, that Sienese painting anticipated by a few years the Florentine manifestations of Cimabue and Giotto, but Mr. Berenson has pointed out that Sienese art is not the beginning but the end of an exquisite convention, the quintessence of Byzantium.  In the Roscoe collection at Liverpool you have one of the most superb and precious examples of this delicate, impeccable and decadent art:  ’Christ found in the Temple,’ by Simone di Martini.

In Egyptian art, again, compare the pure naturalism of the wonderful Egyptian scribe of the Louvre, belonging, I am told, to the fifth or sixth dynasty, with the hieratic and conventional art of the twelfth dynasty; while in the eighteenth dynasty you get a reversion to realism, which critics have the audacity to call a ‘revival of art.’  But you might just as well call it decayed, as indeed they do call some of the most magnificent Ptolemaean remains, simply because they happen to belong to a certain date which, by Egyptian reckoning, may be regarded as very recent.  Just now we very foolishly talk in accents of scorn about the early Victorian art, of which I venture to remind you Turner was not the least ornament.  Of course commercial and political events often interrupt the gestation of the arts, or break our idols in pieces.  Another generation picks up the fragments and puts them together in the wrong way, and that is why it is so confusing and interesting; but there is no reason to be depressed about it.  Only iconoclasm need annoy us.  In histories of English literature too often you find the same attitude when the writer comes to a period which he dislikes.  Restoration Comedy is often said to be a period of debasement, and with Tennyson the young student is given to understand that English literature ceased altogether.  But perhaps there are more modern text-books where the outlook is less gloomy.  If, instead of reading the history of literature, you read the literature itself, you will find plenty of instances of writers at the most brilliant periods complaining of decay.

George Putman, in the Art of English Poesy, published in 1589, when English poetry was starting on a particularly glorious period, says, ’In these days all poets and poesy are despised, they are subject to scorn and derision,’ and ’this proceeds through the barbarous ignorance of the time—­in other ages it was not so.’  Then Jonson, in his ‘Discoveries,’ lamenting the decline of literature, says, ’It is the disease of the age, and no wonder if the world, growing old, begins to be infirm.’  There are hundreds