s been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every
attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of
sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all second hand; and we are
practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a
door-knocker without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are
gone--where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I would we could.

136. In the midst of this desolation we have nothing to count on for
real growth, but what we can find of honest liking and longing, in
ourselves and in others. We must discover, if we would healthily
advance, what things are verily [Greek: timiotata] among us; and if we
delight to honour the dishonourable, consider how, in future, we may
better bestow our likings. Now it appears to me from all our popular
declarations, that we, at present, honour nothing so much as liberty and
independence; and no person so much as the Free man and Self-made man,
who will be ruled by no one, and has been taught, or helped, by no one.
And the reason I chose a fish for you as the first subject of sculpture,
was that in men who are free and self-made, you have the nearest
approach, humanly possible, to the state of the fish, and finely
organized [Greek: herpeton]. You get the exact phrase in Habakkuk, if
you take the Septuagint text.--"[Greek: poieseis tous anthropous hos
tous ichthyas tes thalasses, kai hos ta herpeta ta ouk echonta
hegoumenon."] "Thou wilt make men as the fishes of the sea, and as the
reptile things, _that have no ruler over them_." And it chanced that as
I was preparing this lecture, one of our most able and popular prints
gave me a woodcut of the "self-made man," specified as such, so
vigorously drawn, and with so few touches, that Phidias or Turner
himself could scarcely have done it better; so that I had only to ask my
assistant to enlarge it with accuracy, and it became comparable with my
fish at once. Of course it is not given by the caricaturist as an
admirable face; only, I am enabled by his skill to set before you,
without any suspicion of unfairness on _my_ part, the expression to
which the life we profess to think most honourable, naturally leads. If
we were to take the hat off, you see how nearly the profile corresponds
with that of the typical fish.

[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE AND THE SELF-MADE
MAN.]

137. Such, then, being the definition by your best popular art, of