change of fashion and taste.  From the middle of the sixteenth century down to nearly the middle of the nineteenth, the Middle Ages were always thought of as the Dark Ages.  Scarcely any one could appreciate either the pictorial art or architecture of mediaevalism; those who did so always had to apologise for their predilection.  The wonders of Gothic art were furtively relished by a few antiquaries; and, at certain periods, by men like Beckford and Walpole, as agreeable drawing-room curiosities.  The Romantic movement commenced by Chatterton enabled us to revise a limited and narrow view, based on insufficient information.  It was John Ruskin, in England, who made us see what a splendid heritage the Middle Ages had bequeathed to us.  Ruskin and his disciples then fell into the error of turning the tables on the Renaissance, and regarded everything that deviated from Gothic convention as debased; the whole art of the eighteenth century was anathema to them.  The decadence began, according to Ruskin, with Raphael.  Out of that ingenious error, or synchronous with it, began the brilliant movement of the Pre-Raphaelites in the middle of the last century.  And when the Pre-Raphaelites appeared, every one said the end of Art had arrived.  Dickens openly attacked them; Thackeray ridiculed the new tendencies; every one, great and small, spoke of decay and decline.  The French word Decadence had not crept into use.  However, the weary Titan staggered on, as Matthew Arnold said, and when Mr. Whistler’s art dawned on the horizon, Ruskin was among the first to see in it signs of decay.  Except the poetry of Swinburne, never has any art met with such abuse.  An example of the immortal painter now adorns the National Gallery of British painting, which is cared for—­oh, irony of circumstances—­by one of the first prophets of impressionism in this country, or, rather, let me say, one of the first English critics—­Mr. D. S. MacColl.

But you will now ask how do I account for those periods when apparently the liberal arts are supposed not to have existed?  I maintain they did exist, or that human intellect was otherwise employed.  The excavations of prehistoric cities are evidences of my contention.  Because things are destroyed we must not say they have decayed; if evidences are scarce, do not say they never existed.  Our architecture, for example, took five hundred years to develop out of the splendid Norman through the various transitions of Gothic down to the perfection of the English country house in Elizabethan and Jacobean times.  If church architecture was decaying, domestic architecture was improving. Architecture is, of course, the first and most important of all the arts, and when the human intellect is being used up for some other purpose there is a temporary cessation; there is never any decay of architecture.  The putting up of ugly buildings is merely a sign of growing stupidity, not of declining intellect or decaying taste.  Jerry-building is the successful competition of dishonesty against competency.  Do not imagine that because the good architects do not get commissions to put up useful or beautiful buildings they do not exist.  The history of stupidity and the history of bad taste must one day engage our serious attention.  There is no decay, alas, even in stupidity and bad taste.