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96 Board supported the drawing-master and defended his system. Not that they thouglit liim the best possible teacher, but the best for the emergency, being able to thoroughly interest pupils and their daily teachers in the work, and to make a beginning tliat was best under the circumstances. To have abandoned his defence then would have put an end to the system and banished drawing from the schools. Strangely enough the leading artists of the city were loudest in the outcry against the drawing- master, and kept up a sharp fusilade against liini, and against the School Board, in the newspapers. From their point of view they were right. The drawing- master was not a Titian, and liis lessons did not lead up to the studios so much as to the workshops and factories. But had the direction of drawing been intrusted to any one of those artists, even to William Hunt, the experiment would not have been allowed to continue a year. Drawing, to be firmly established, needed a broad base, and to rely as much on patent, practical uses as upon the higher, more remote, and less tangible results in art and taste. Artists and art-lovers formed too small a proportion of the community. After the lessons had made some progress, it was wonderful to see the breaking out of the signs of skill and intelligence in unexpected places. Some of the pupils in the poorest quarters of the city, and from the poorest families in those quarters, came to make copies of casts, ornaments, arabesques, etc., that were remarkable for force, correctness,.and delicacy. During the years in which I was a mem- ber of the Board, I examined many hundreds of the drawing - books, and often with admiration and pride. I do not know that any of those pupils became artists — in my view, that fact is not impor- tant ; there will be time enough for that — but it is certain that their exercises moulded their tastes and refined their perceptions. The result must be felt in their homes when they come to be men and women. Tawdry pictures, plaster images, coloured lithographs, and the like, such as the common people in most countries are contented with, will find no favour in their eyes. If I have dwelt on the practical view of this subject, it is because the condition of Boston and Massachusetts demanded it. The thin and stony soil cannot produce one-half the necessary food, and the people must be sustained largely by manufactures. To increase the efficiency of workmen is to increase the general wealth ; and a carpenter who can make the plans for his work is worth two men. In how many trades the same thing applies ! The improve- ment in the work of mechanics and manufacturers in recent years is very marked. Stoves, carriages, harnesses, furniture, carpets, and other articles, once so coarse and bungling, are now made in what may be fairly called artistic forms. Designs in printed cloths, iron castings, chandeliers, and domestic utensils are noticeably more tasteful and refined. How much tliis means for the future of the artisan class it is not necessary to urge. Nor is it necessary to do more than allude to the fact that the condi- tion and needs of Scotland are very similar to those of Massachusetts. But it must not be supposed that I put tliis forward as the chief end and aim of instruction in drawing. The leaf-mould of this season nourishes the flowers of the next. Out of material needs finer instincts and aspirations are born. The prac- tical and the ideal are strangely enlaced and inter- penetrated, like body and soul. And the workman who is striving for beauty in the work of his liands, even for ambitious or sordid motives, is disciplin- ing his powers for higher things ; and the impaljsable results — the flowering of mind, the sense, the ideal, the artistic touch — will come later, either in his own life or that of his off^spring. It is not worth while to make a comparison between the circumstances of modern life and the state of tilings in which Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Flemish schools of art were born. The history of those scjiools will not be repeated, any more tlian the life of the bygone centuries. But this is certain, that the production of great works of art is not to be looked for except in communities where an artistic sentiment vitalises the atmosphere. It may require generations to bring about the favourable conditions ; and, so far as can be judged, the brilliant, inquisitive, utilitarian, scientific tendencies of our age are less friendly to art than those of the centuries which we are apt to consider ignorant and credulous. As the church and the nobles are no longer the sole or even the princijial patrons of artists, it is to the people they must look ; and if the people are to become patrons, they must be educated. So we come to the point from which we started. There may have been some rare emanations of genius in communities destitute of artistic wealtli, but the rule is otherwise. Out of the abundance of taste and feeling come new and higher forms of creative art. To the people that hath shall be given. In Scotland there is no superabundance, although there have been many great artists among her sons. Painters and sculptors naturally seek the capital of the kingdom, and therefore the greater effort is necessary to secure the influence and the results of art in remote quarters. If that influence is to