fourpence for them, if you will be answerable for the extra
threepence yourself, till next year!"

(III.) I say you have despised Art! "What!" you again answer,
"have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we not pay
thousands of pounds for single pictures? and have we not Art schools
and institutions,--more than ever nation had before?" Yes, truly,
but all that is for the sake of the shop. You would fain sell
canvas as well as coals, and crockery as well as iron; you would
take every other nation's bread out of its mouth if you could; {15}
not being able to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the
thoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to
every passer-by, "What d'ye lack?" You know nothing of your own
faculties or circumstances; you fancy that, among your damp, flat,
fat fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the Frenchman
among his bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic cliffs;--
that Art may be learned, as book-keeping is, and when learned, will
give you more books to keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, no
more than you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There is
always room on the walls for the bills to be read,--never for the
pictures to be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by
repute) in the country, nor whether they are false or true, nor
whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign countries, you
calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world rotting in
abandoned wreck--(in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberately
pointed at the palaces containing them), and if you heard that all
the fine pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow on
the Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so much as the chance
of a brace or two of game less in your own bags, in a day's
shooting. That is your national love of Art.