The suddenness with which the literature of the sixteenth century developed in England has been explained, I know, by the Reformation.  But you should remember the other critics of art, who ascribe the barrenness of our painting and the necessity of importing continental artists, also to the Reformation.  I suggest that the intellectual capacity of the nation was directed towards literature, politics and religious controversy, rather than to art and religion.  I cannot think there was any scarcity of the artistic germ in the English nation which had already expressed itself in the great Abbeys and Churches, such as Glastonbury, Tintern, Fountains, and York.  And you must remember that the minor art of embroidery, the ‘opus anglicanum’ (which flourished for three centuries previous to the Reformation), was famous throughout Europe.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the big men, Swift, Pope, and Addison, having passed away, the Augustan age of English literature seemed exhausted.  It was a time of intellectual dyspepsia; every one was much too fond of ruins; people built sham ruins on their estates.  Rich men, who could afford the luxury, kept a dilapidated hermit in a cavern.  Their chief pleasure on the continent was measuring ruins in the way described so amusingly by Goldsmith in The Citizen of the World.  Though no century was more thoroughly pleased with itself, I might almost say smugly self-satisfied, the men of that century were always lamenting the decline of the age.  The observations of Johnson and Goldsmith I need scarcely repeat.  But here is one which may have escaped your notice.  It is not a suggestion of decline, but an assertion of non-existence.  Gray, the poet, the cultivated connoisseur, the Professor of History, writing in 1763 to Count Algarrotti, says:  ’Why this nation has made no advances hitherto in painting and sculpture it is hard to say; the fact is undeniable, and we have the vanity to apologise for ourselves as Virgil did for the Romans: 

   Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
   Credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
   Orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus
   Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent: 
   Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
   Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
   Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

’You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to see that art shall one day flourish in England. I too much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far.’  Yet in 1754 Chippendale had published his Cabinet Makers’ Guide; and the next fifty years was to see the production of all that beautiful English furniture of which we are so justly proud, and which we forge with such surprising skill.  It was the next fifty years that saw the production of the beautiful English pottery which we prize so highly, and it was the next hundred years that was to be the period of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Crome, Cotman, Alfred Stevens, and Turner, who died in 1851, just when the Pre-Raphaelites were supposed to be inaugurating the decay of that which Gray denied the existence, nearly one hundred years before.