—anymore than other analogies—too far; for
to carry analogy into too great detail is to
destroy its usefulness, and deprive ourselves of
one of the safest and wisest teachers we have.
We contend for no more than that the world
has become practical and sensible. It has done
with toys, it has lost its enthusiasm for studs
and scarf-pins. It has got to think of what
will "do" The boyish days are over. The
"box of paints" is put by. The world makes
money. It is cautious, moderate in speech,
fore-thoughtful in act. Machinery and the arts
that facilitate the act of living are alive and
flourishing. How many things are dead! Dead
but not buried all of them. Some of our dead
institutions are embalmed, and so kept above
ground; some are galvanised into a kind of life
by those whose interest it is to keep them going.
Some are paralysed and virtually defunct, though
the heavy breath is still drawn and the languid
pulse still beats. Thus, popery is dead, and
monarchy—real old absolute monarchy—is dead,
but the bodies are still above ground, and will
remain so for many a year to come. And the
American Union is dead, but what fighting is
going on over that body, and what a funeral
wake it has!

We must be careful what we do in classing
things among the dead, It is not everything
that has lost its first exceeding vitality and the
strength of novelty, that can be set down as
dead, nor even everything that has ceased to
advance. When new members are admitted
into society the older members are not therefore
ejected. The new are added to the old, and all
go on together.

It would be wrong, for instance, for any one,
observing the extraordinary vitality of mechanics
in the present day, to say that the arts
were dead. To say that the natural expression
of the mind of the age is not through art would
be to speak the truth, as it would be to say that
it is through machinery. There were ages when
the mind of civilisation expressed itself through
art. That time is over, and the man who would
be essentially a man of the day must ally himself
with the mode of expression belonging to the
day. Just now, he had better on the whole hang
on to the tender of the locomotive than occupy
the best seat in the chariot of fancy.

It is impossible to spend any time at the
International Exhibition—impossible to look at
the building itself, or to pass from the
picture-galleries to the machinery department—without
feeling in what direction the vigour of the age
is tending, and what are its greatest wonders
and things of mark. The arts are invented,
established, brought to perfection. We can only
go on practising them, each professor bringing
his own manner of dealing with them to bear on
them, and enriching their repertory with his
additional atom. This is much to do in the arts, and
few, indeed, are the men who can do it. But with
mechanics the case is widely, widely different.
What a prospect is open to the student in that
science. What a laud of promise is spread out
before him. What rewards tempt him on. What
possible discoveries urge him to new efforts, and
banish that lassitude and despondency which
often paralyse the follower of the arts. When
the mechanician has turned that corner in the
road, or got past the brow of that hill, he knows
not what may reward his toil. The voyage of
discovery in which he is engaged was only entered
on the other day. But yesterday the electric
telegraph was invented; the iron road but the
day before. To-morrow, some other new
invention, not dreamed of now, will be in force.
"And why may not I be the discoverer of it?"
says the mechanician as he works and thinks.
It is more encouraging to help to raise a new
edifice than to add fresh beauties to a structure
already brought to such great perfection.

This will probably force itself on the mind
of any unprejudiced observer who will feel the
public pulse as it beats at South Kensington.
Neither the enthusiast who thinks art the only
thing in the world, nor the practical man who
is all for iron, will entirely agree with us. But
both are prejudiced. And before Prejudice,
Reason has only to retire.

Suppose Reason were by any chance to direct
her steps into the mediaeval court, the ecclesiastical
decorative department, of the International
Exhibition. What a fall she would have to try
with Prejudice there! One of two results must
come of such a visit. Either Prejudice must
shut up her court, entirely routed by Reason; or
Reason, giving one glance round, must retire and
leave the thing to Time, to be dealt with as that
merciful and wise judge does deal with things.
What a mystical and becoming light is over all
the objects contained in that court! It is dark,
not because the light cannot get to that part of
the building, but because the light has been
wilfully shut out—just as the designs are quaint
and uncouth, not because the designer could not
make them otherwise, but because he wilfully
drew a curtain over his brains.

The white neckcloths and the spectacles
gleam in that obscure court, like meteors. They
were better out of it. It is not helping the
ecclesiastical cause to ally it with darkness and
with obsolete modes of expression, as if it had
no part with the age, and as if modern light and
modern knowledge and modern ways of thought
must be banished before Church matters can be
discussed at all.

This is the loose screw here. Many of the
designs are pretty and elegant, but they are all
tainted with affectation and dilettanteism—bad
things to mix up with anything, but very very bad
things to mix up with religion. How tired one
gets of the altar-cloths and fald-stools, the
trefoils and fleurs-de-lis, and all the rest of this
Church upholstery! What a thing to have
opinions which cannot be held comfortably
unless their proprietor has a sofa to match. Such
a sofa as that in one of the corners of this court,
straight and angular, and stuffed, possibly, with
discarded horse-hair shirts. It is pleasant, by the
way, to observe that mediæval tendencies are not
inconsistent with an appreciation of the
creature-comforts; for, hard by this same angular sofa,