aring,--chattering,--giggling,--trampling out
every vestige of national honor and domestic peace, wherever it sets the
staggering hoof of it; incapable of reading, of hearing, of thinking, of
looking,--capable only of greed for money, lust for food, pride of
dress, and the prurient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics
last announced by the newsmonger, and the religion last rolled by the
chemist into electuary for the dead.

238. In the miserably competitive labor of finding new stimulus for the
appetite--daily more gross--of this tyrannous mob, we may count as lost,
beyond any hope, the artists who are dull, docile, or distressed enough
to submit to its demands; and we may count the dull and the distressed
by myriads;--and among the docile, many of the best intellects we
possess. The few who have sense and strength to assert their own place
and supremacy, are driven into discouraged disease by their isolation,
like Turner and Blake; the one abandoning the design of his 'Liber
Studiorum' after imperfectly and sadly, against total public neglect,
carrying it forward to what it is,--monumental, nevertheless, in
landscape engraving; the other producing, with one only majestic series
of designs from the book of Job, nothing for his life's work but
coarsely iridescent sketches of enigmatic dream.

239. And, for total result of our English engraving industry during the
last hundred and fifty years, I find that practically at this moment I
cannot get a _single_ piece of true, sweet, and comprehensible art, to
place for instruction in any children's school! I can get, for ten
pounds apiece, well-engraved portraits of Sir Joshua's beauties showing
graceful limbs through flowery draperies; I can get--dirt-cheap--any
quantity of Dutch flats, ditches, and hedges, enlivened by cows chewing
the cud, and dogs behaving indecently; I can get heaps upon heaps of
temples, and forums, and altars, arranged as for academical competition,
round seaports, with curled-up ships that only touch the water with the
middle of their bottoms. I can get, at the price of lumber, any quantity
of British squires flourishing whips and falling over hurdles; and, in
suburban shops, a dolorous variety of widowed mothers nursing babies in
a high light with the Bible on a table, and baby's shoes on a chair.
Also, of cheap prints, painted red and blue, of Christ blessing little
children, of Joseph and his brethren, the infant Samuel, or Daniel in
the lio