near towns, and liable therefore to be defiled by common usage, we
could not use the loveliest art more worthily than by sheltering the
spring and its first pools with precious marbles: nor ought anything
to be esteemed more important, as a means of healthy education, than
the care to keep the streams of it afterwards, to as great a distance
as possible, pure, full of fish, and easily accessible to children.
There used to be, thirty years ago, a little rivulet of the Wandel,
about an inch deep, which ran over the carriage-road and under a
footbridge just under the last chalk hill near Croydon. Alas! men came
and went; and it--did _not_ go on for ever. It has long since been
bricked over by the parish authorities; but there was more education
in that stream with its minnows than you could get out of a thousand
pounds spent yearly in the parish schools, even though you were to
spend every farthing of it in teaching the nature of oxygen and
hydrogen, and the names, and rate per minute, of all the rivers in
Asia and America.

Well, the gist of this matter lies here then. Suppose we want a school
of pottery again in England, all we poor artists are ready to do the
best we can, to show you how pretty a line may be that is twisted first
to one side, and then to the other; and how a plain household-blue will
make a pattern on white; and how ideal art may be got out of the
spaniel's colours of black and tan. But I tell you beforehand, all that
we can do will be utterly useless, unless you teach your peasant to say
grace, not only before meat, but before drink; and having provided him
with Greek cups and platters, provide him also with something that is
not poisoned to put into them.

There cannot be any need that I should trace for you the conditions of
art that are directly founded on serviceableness of dress, and of
armour; but it is my duty to affirm to you, in the most positive
manner, that after recovering, for the poor, wholesomeness of food,
your next step toward founding schools of art in England must be in
recovering, for the poor, decency and wholesomeness of dress;
thoroughly good in substance, fitted for their daily work, becoming to
their rank in life, and worn with order and dignity. And this order
and dignity must be taught them by the women of the upper and middle
classes, whose minds can be in nothing right, as long as they are so
wrong in this matter us to endure the squalor of the poor, while they
themselves