nevertheless long before it was quite dead it had fallen so low that
the whole subject was usually treated with the utmost contempt by
every one who had any pretence of being a sensible man, and in short
the whole civilised world had forgotten that there had ever been an
art MADE BY THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE AS A JOY FOR THE MAKER AND THE
USER.

But now it seems to me that the very suddenness of the change ought
to comfort us, to make us look upon this break in the continuity of
the golden chain as an accident only, that itself cannot last: for
think how many thousand years it may be since that primeval man
graved with a flint splinter on a bone the story of the mammoth he
had seen, or told us of the slow uplifting of the heavily-horned
heads of the reindeer that he stalked: think I say of the space of
time from then till the dimming of the brightness of the Italian
Renaissance! whereas from that time till popular art died unnoticed
and despised among ourselves is just but two hundred years.

Strange too, that very death is contemporaneous with new-birth of
something at all events; for out of all despair sprang a new time of
hope lighted by the torch of the French Revolution: and things that
have languished with the languishing of art, rose afresh and surely
heralded its new birth: in good earnest poetry was born again, and
the English Language, which under the hands of sycophantic verse-
makers had been reduced to a miserable jargon, whose meaning, if it
have a meaning, cannot be made out without translation, flowed
clear, pure, and simple, along with the music of Blake and
Coleridge: take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves,
as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the
time of George II.