Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/42

 I desire to refer to-night. For great artists and great sculptors cannot be produced, even like Senior Classics and Senior Wranglers, by great schools and great universities. They can only be produced very largely at Nature's own pleasure, at her own time and in her own way, her own, very often, quaint and striking fashion. But though they cannot be produced at schools, yet I think that the history of the art world will show us that they will arise from among the children of an educated race, cultivated in music and in literature, and of a race where there has been developed an innate instinct for beauty, derived from arts practised from father to son, and extended from valley to valley, and from workshop to workshop.

I referred a few minutes ago to the divorce which the introduction of machinery and the great industrial revolution of the last century and a half have brought into the art and industry of this country. I think that that divorce has had a bad effect upon both the artists of our day and upon the workmen, the craftsmen of our day. For it comes to this, when the artist, say the architect, has great