me say, one of the first English critics--Mr. D. S. MacColl.

But you will now ask how do I account for those periods when apparently
the liberal arts are supposed not to have existed? I maintain they did
exist, or that human intellect was otherwise employed. The excavations
of prehistoric cities are evidences of my contention. Because things are
destroyed we must not say they have decayed; if evidences are scarce, do
not say they never existed. Our architecture, for example, took five
hundred years to develop out of the splendid Norman through the various
transitions of Gothic down to the perfection of the English country house
in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. If church architecture was decaying,
domestic architecture was improving. _Architecture is, of course, the
first and most important of all the arts_, and when the human intellect
is being used up for some other purpose there is a temporary cessation;
there is never any decay of architecture. The putting up of ugly
buildings is merely a sign of growing stupidity, not of declining
intellect or decaying taste. Jerry-building is the successful
competition of dishonesty against competency. Do not imagine that
because the good architects do not get commissions to put up useful or
beautiful buildings they do not exist. The history of stupidity and the
history of bad taste must one day engage our serious attention. There is
no decay, alas, even in stupidity and bad taste.

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 exhauste