o, little or none of the evil.

Nor do I hold it usually an advantage to art, in teaching, that it
_should_ be common, or constantly seen. In becoming intelligibly and
kindly beautiful, while it remains solitary and unrivaled, it has a
greater power. Westminster Abbey is more didactic to the English nation,
than a million of popular illustrated treatises on architecture.

Nay, even that it cannot be understood but with some difficulty, and
must be sought before it can be seen, is no harm. The noblest didactic
art is, as it were, set on a hill, and its disciples come to it. The
vilest destructive and corrosive art stands at the street corners,
crying, "Turn in hither; come, eat of my bread, and drink of my wine,
which I have mingled."

And Dr. Woltmann has allowed himself too easily to fall into the common
notion of Liberalism, that bad art, disseminated, is instructive, and
good art isolated, not so. The question is, first, I assure you, whether
what art you have got is good or bad. If essentially bad, the more you
see of it, the worse for you. Entirely popular art is all that is noble,
in the cathedral, the council chamber, and the market-place; not the
paltry colored print pinned on the wall of a private room.

43. I despise the poor!--do I, think you? Not so. They only despise the
poor who think them better off with police news, and colored tracts of
the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, than they were with Luini
painting on their church walls, and Donatello carving the pillars of
their market-places.

Nevertheless, the effort to be universally, instead of locally,
didactic, modified advantageously, as you know, and in a thousand ways
varied, the earlier art of engraving: and the development of its popular
power, whether for good or evil, came exactly--so fate appointed--at a
time when the minds of the masses were agitated by the struggle which
closed in the Reformation in some countries, and in the desperate
refusal of Reformation in others.[F] The two greatest masters of
engraving whose lives we are to study, were, both of them, passionate
reformers: Holbein no less than Luther; Botticelli no less than
Savonarola.

44. Reformers, I mean, in the full and, accurately, the only, sense. Not
preachers of new doctrines; but witnesses against the betrayal of the
old ones, which were on the lips of all men, and in the lives of none.
Nay, the painters are indeed more pure reformers than the priests. They
rebuked t