With that literature in which romance, that is to say humanity, was
re-born, there sprang up also a feeling for the romance of external
nature, which is surely strong in us now, joined with a longing to
know something real of the lives of those who have gone before us;
of these feelings united you will find the broadest expression in
the pages of Walter Scott: it is curious as showing how sometimes
one art will lag behind another in a revival, that the man who wrote
the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of the Heart of
Midlothian, for instance, thought himself continually bound to seem
to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic
Architecture: he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it
gave him pleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art,
having been taught in many ways that nothing could be art that was
not done by a named man under academical rules.

I need not perhaps dwell much on what of change has been since: you
know well that one of the master-arts, the art of painting, has been
revolutionised. I have a genuine difficulty in speaking to you of
men who are my own personal friends, nay my masters: still, since I
cannot quite say nothing of them I must say the plain truth, which
is this; never in the whole history of art did any set of men come
nearer to the feat of making something out of nothing than that
little knot of painters who have raised English art from what it
was, when as a boy I used to go to the Royal Academy Exhibition, to
what it is now.

It would be ungracious indeed for me who have been so much taught by
him, that I cannot help feeling continually as I speak that I am
echoing his words, to leave out the name of John Ruskin from an