The words greet us from the lid of a china patch box, a pale,
bright yellow, a trivial little object devoted to a silly pur-
pose, but it is stamped with a sentiment from The Deserted
Village. We find it almost impossible to realize that the
fleeting vision with which our eyes are occasionally blessed
was to the eighteenth-century man or woman the common
sight of daily life; plain elegance, uncompromising good
taste, surrounded them with an almost monotonous com-
pleteness.

But if we are in danger of breaking our hearts over this
spirit of beauty which has vanished from the earth, it is our
duty to remember that there existed with it, ignored or
tolerated, a state of squalor and wretchedness which, to this
relatively humane and hygienic age, is nearly as difficult to
visualize as its heavenly obverse. The state of English prisons
as revealed by Howard's survey published in 1777, the
London slums, in which Dr. Johnson roughly computed
that one thousand people starved to death every year, the
conditions of the Army and Navy, on active service, and
when thrown crippled and destitute, without pension and
without charity, on a heedless world, the savage callousness
of the officials entrusted with the administration of Poor
Relief, the manifold horrors, already springing into exist-
ence, of the Industrial Revolution--all these things very
wholesomely temper our regret, our feeling that, as Dr.
Johnson would have said: "It is a melancholy thing to be
reserved to these times," and very nearly resign us to an age
of mob mentality and mass production. Nonetheless, when
we are considering that age, the last of those in English his-
tory which produced works of great art, we must consider
too the texture of the daily experience of the ordinary seeing,
hearing, feeling individual; vulgarity they had in plenty,
but it was the vulgarity of Gilray and Rowlandson's cartoons,

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