worse its chance. For that which is prepared for private persons, to
be kept under cover, will, of necessity, degenerate into the copyism of
past work, or merely sensational and sensual forms of present life,
unless there be a governing school addressing the populace, for their
instruction, on the outside of buildings. So that, as I partly warned
you in my third lecture, you can simply have _no_ sculpture in a coal
country. Whether you like coals or carvings best, is no business of
mine. I merely have to assure you of the fact that they are
incompatible.

But, assuming that we are again, some day, to become a civilized and
governing race, deputing ironmongery, coal-digging, and lucre-digging,
to our slaves in other countries, it is quite conceivable that, with an
increasing knowledge of natural history, and desire for such knowledge,
what is now done by careful, but inefficient, woodcuts, and in
ill-coloured engravings, might be put in quite permanent sculptures,
with inlay of variegated precious stones, on the outside of buildings,
where such pictures would be little costly to the people; and in a more
popular manner still, by Robbia ware and Palissy ware, and inlaid
majolica, which would differ from the housewives' present favourite
decoration of plates above her kitchen dresser, by being every piece of
it various, instructive, and universally visible.

133. You hardly know, I suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or
earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the
strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of
destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of
instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream or jest. Still, I do
not absolutely propose to decorate our public buildings with sculpture
wholly of this character; though beast, and fowl, and creeping things,
and fishes, might all find room on such a building as the Solomon's
House of a New Atlantis; and some of them might even become symbolic of
much to us again. Passing through the Strand, only the other day, for
instance, I saw four highly finished and delicately coloured pictures of
cock-fighting, which, for imitative quality, were nearly all that could
be desired, going far beyond the Greek cock of Himera; and they would
have delighted a Greek's soul, if they had meant as much as a Greek
cock-fight; but they were only types of the "[Greek: endomachas
alektor]," and of the spirit of home c