I HUMBLY trust that my strictures on modern English decorations may open the eyes of a few to the remediable flaws in taste, and necessity for founding an English school of design. This must be no poor copy of the thoughts of other nations and races, and it must be rather Gothic than Classic in its type. At present, on reviewing nearly four centuries of British decorative work since the Renascence, what may be said to stand forth as a truly indigenous growth, or to have originated anything like a school? Nothing, save perhaps Gibbons' carving, up to the present century. Our goldsmiths and carvers may have been many and talented; they may have varied somewhat the foreign methods and designs which they received; in the middle ages they undoubtedly gave a certain original stamp to the architecture given us by Saxons and Nor-mans; but art on the whole must be considered an exotic like many other things which we have used well when they came to us.

Britain has always been ruled by foreigners both in art and politics. Painting, engraving, chasing precious metals, cameo-cutting, all these crafts came to us from overseas, and chiefly after the Renascence. Our proficiency with the needle which once distinguished us among the nations is practically ours no longer; we have no embroiderers to compare with the Italian and Spanish lace-makers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, any more than we have smiths to compare with Spanish and German cutlers and iron-workers - though Smith is so common a name! And as for our carving in the boasted oak of Old England, it is done by steam nowadays and beneath contempt.

In the present century, however, our prae-Raphaelite painters, - a very recent growth - ought to be excepted as a definite and I think indigenous school; the distinctive element in it, the straightforward literalness mingled oddly with a very tender fancy, is 'Gothic' in its nature. No people are more easily led by their imagination than the seeming sluggish and phlegmatic Britons.

This band of painters have formed a peculiar scheme of decoration which I do not find out of England, depending on boldly variegated colour and much gold, as though a true and natural advance upon early English colouring, interrupted by the Renascence.

One of the best examples of this new kind of decoration which I have seen is that in Trinity Chapel, Cambridge, which is in tone at once tender and rich, and many of the designs (perhaps adapted from antique ones) are extremely beautiful and suggestive both on ceiling and walls. It is remarkable that during two recent visits to Cambridge, I inquired of many residents, Fellows of Colleges, etc, who conducted the redecoration of this important feature of Cambridge; and totally failed to find out. This is illustrative of the English interest in art and good art-workmen.

After a year's patient inquiry I discovered that Mr. Henry Holiday supervised the work, which accounts for its merit.

Much remains to be done before England can claim to be an artistic country. Modern teaching has corrected some blots in the intolerable school of design which ushered in the present century,but it has not yet chased from the domestic field the furniture which makes home hideous, nor taught people to think for themselves.

We must throw off the ill-fitting classic garb, which, as I have elsewhere shown, we have thrice tried and found unmanageable, and only take from classic sources the principles which made classic art great, applying them as beseems our climate, our classes, and our national character. The reform will not come from above, but from below - from the people, not the selfish and soporific 'aesthetes.'

It must start from Gothic times, before Raphael, and disregard nicknames if it would recover the graceful facility and happy freedom which characterised English fourteenth-century art, and made it a living product. The spirit is not dead, but sleepeth.

When our museums are thrown open on the only day in the week (Sunday) when the busy working man can regularly visit them - and his visits must be frequent to be fruitful, not only on Bank holidays with his arms full of babies- -the English artisan may suck in ideas of his own, and when he is a more cultivated individual than at present he will love his work better, and prize his own good name. At present it is our fault, the customer's in fact, that he is no better, and has never had the advantages common to other European countries, where the workman has been more lovingly educated and his name better remembered.

The public, who purchase, must also learn to appreciate what their artisans achieve, to distinguish good work from scamped; and not ignorantly censure, nor ignorantly praise.

And each one of us individually may aid the nation by self-culture; may make his own house a standing lesson and protest, by merely caring how his walls are covered, and how his goods are placed in juxtaposition, Whether or not he knows better than the rest, his caring and insisting on the right of individual thought and action are a support and assistance.