l relish the prospect, being strongly of
opinion that when every branch of art becomes popular it will be
vulgarised. This notion arises from a fallacy which has affected ideas
during the nineteenth century in many matters besides art, the mistake
of supposing that vulgar people all belong to one grade of society.

Yet every one who knows modern England, for instance, is perfectly
aware that the highest standard of taste is only to be found in the
elect of all classes of society. After the experience of the
eighteenth century, surely it ought to have been recognised that the
"upper ten thousand," when left to develop vulgarity in its true
essence, can attain to a degree of perfection hardly possible in any
other social grade. Is there in the whole range of pictorial art
anything more irredeemably vulgar than a "State Portrait" by Sir
Thomas Lawrence or one of his imitators?

It was under the prompting of a dread of the process of popularising
art that so many eminent painters of the nineteenth century protested
against the fashion set by Sir J. E. Millais when he sold such
pictures as "Cherry Ripe" and "Bubbles," knowing they were intended
for reproduction in very large numbers by mechanical means. From a
somewhat similar motive a few of the leading artists of the nineteenth
century for a time stood aloof from the movement for familiarising the
people with at least the form, if not the colouring, of each notable
picture of the year. From small and very unpretentious beginnings, the
published pictorial notes of the Royal Academy and other exhibitions
of the year have risen to most imposing proportions; and already there
is some talk of attempting a few of the best from each year's
production in colours.

Half-tone zinco and similar processes have brought down the expenses
entailed by reproductions in colour-work, so as to render an
undertaking of this kind much more feasible than it was in the middle
of the last half-century. "Cherry Ripe" cost five thousand pounds to
reproduce, by the laborious processes of printing not only each
colour, but almost every different shade of each colour from a
different surface.

In the "three-colour-zinco" process of reproduction only three
printings are required, each colour with all its delicate gradations
of shade being fully provided for by a single engraved block. When
machines of great precision have been finally perfected for admitting
of the successive blocks being printed f