people call it, in those days; that and not robber-barons and
inaccessible kings with their hierarchy of serving-nobles and other
such rubbish: but art grew and grew, saw empires sicken and
sickened with them; grew hale again, and haler, and grew so great at
last, that she seemed in good truth to have conquered everything,
and laid the material world under foot. Then came a change at a
period of the greatest life and hope in many ways that Europe had
known till then: a time of so much and such varied hope that people
call it the time of the New Birth: as far as the arts are concerned
I deny it that title; rather it seems to me that the great men who
lived and glorified the practice of art in those days, were the
fruit of the old, not the seed of the new order of things: but a
stirring and hopeful time it was, and many things were newborn then
which have since brought forth fruit enough: and it is strange and
perplexing that from those days forward the lapse of time, which,
through plenteous confusion and failure, has on the whole been
steadily destroying privilege and exclusiveness in other matters,
has delivered up art to be the exclusive privilege of a few, and has
taken from the people their birthright; while both wronged and
wrongers have been wholly unconscious of what they were doing.

Wholly unconscious--yes, but we are no longer so: there lies the
sting of it, and there also the hope.

When the brightness of the so-called Renaissance faded, and it faded
very suddenly, a deadly chill fell upon the arts: that New-birth
mostly meant looking back to past times, wherein the men of those
days thought they saw a perfection of art, which to their minds was
different in kind, and not in degree only, from the ruder suggestive
art of their own fathers: this perfection they were ambitious to