d. It was a time of intellectual dyspepsia; every one was
much too fond of ruins; people built sham ruins on their estates. Rich
men, who could afford the luxury, kept a dilapidated hermit in a cavern.
Their chief pleasure on the continent was measuring ruins in the way
described so amusingly by Goldsmith in _The Citizen of the World_. Though
no century was more thoroughly pleased with itself, I might almost say
smugly self-satisfied, the men of that century were always lamenting the
decline of the age. The observations of Johnson and Goldsmith I need
scarcely repeat. But here is one which may have escaped your notice. It
is not a suggestion of decline, but an assertion of non-existence. Gray,
the poet, the cultivated connoisseur, the Professor of History, writing
in 1763 to Count Algarrotti, says: 'Why this nation has made no advances
hitherto in painting and sculpture it is hard to say; the fact is
undeniable, and we have the vanity to apologise for ourselves as Virgil
did for the Romans:

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
Credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
Orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus
Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

'You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to see that art
shall one day flourish in England. _I too much wish, but can hardly
extend my hopes so far_.' Yet in 1754 Chippendale had published his
Cabinet Makers' Guide; and the next fifty years was to see the production
of all that beautiful English furniture of which we are so justly proud,
and which we forge with such surprising skill. It was the next fifty
years that saw the production of the beautiful English pottery which we
prize so highly, and it was the next hundred years that was to be the
period of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Crome, Cotman, Alfred
Stevens, and Turner, who died in 1851, just when the Pre-Raphaelites were
supposed to be inaugurating the decay of that which Gray denied the
existence, nearly one hundred years before.

Though the scope of my discussion is limited to literature and art, it
would be paltry to confine our inquiries within limited horizons.
Painting and architecture, alas, are not the whole of life; the fine arts
are only the flowers of existence; they are useful as humanising
elements; but they are n