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Rh have to buy. Consequently the ultimate appeal is to the taste of the public, for art, if it be not the desire to give pleasure by the representation of beauty, is nothing. Beauty, of course, must not necessarily be confounded with prettiness; it may be beauty of character. The result is, therefore, that the decorative art of any period is an indication of that which gives pleasure at the moment, and an absolute reflex of the artistic wishes, desires, and tastes of the cultivated classes to whom executive art must appeal. At every period it has been found that this taste is constantly changing, and as a consequence the examples of decorative art of any period are a reflex only of the artistic ideas current at the time the work was done.

At all periods, therefore, even during the early Victorian period, which we are now taught and believe to be the most ghastly period through which English art has passed, the art in vogue has been what the public have admired, and have been ready to pay for, and most emphatically what they have been taught and brought up to consider good art. In early Victorian days there was no lack of educated people, and because they liked the particular form of decoration associated with their period, who is justified in saying that, because that peculiar style of decoration is not acceptable now to ourselves, their art was bad, and worse than our own? If throughout the ages there had been one dominating style of decoration equally accepted at all periods and by all authorities as the highest type of decorative art, then we should have some standard to judge by. Such is not the case, and we have no such standard, and any attempt to arbitrarily create and control ideas between given parallel lines of arbitrary thought, when the ideas are constantly changing, is impossible and undesirable. Who dreams of questioning the art of Benvenuto Cellini, or of describing his craftsmanship as other than one of the most vivid examples of his period, and yet what had it in keeping with the art of the Louis XVI. period, or the later art of William Morris and his followers? Widely divergent as are these types, they are nevertheless all accepted as the highest expressions of three separate types of decorative art. Any one attempting to compare them, or to rank these schools of artistic thought in order of superiority, would simply be laying themselves open to ridicule unspeakable, for they would be ranked by the highest authorities of different periods in different orders, and it is as impossible to create a permanent standard of art as it is impossible to ensure a permanence of any particular public taste. The fact that taste changes, and as a consequence that artistic styles and types vary, is simply due to the everlasting desire on the part of the public for some new thing, and their equally permanent appreciation of novelty of idea or sensation. That master-minds have arisen to teach, and