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Women who feel within themselves the power to bear on the sacred torch and to draw minds directly towards the idea of the beautiful certainly ought not to hesitate. But after all, to appreciate art in its practical results, to criticise it, to support it by one's approbation, is a very noble end, and one suited to any woman, however retiring. History and experience show that these practical influences are often the most effective. This secret society, that religious association accomplish more by simply living their creed day by day than by all your dogmatic teaching. What extraordinary power might not women wield if they were all animated by one spirit urging them towards a common end! And what a noble end-to sustain in the world the healthful principles of beauty, to fill the life of men really and truly with things they can love! To assign to art this social mission, to carry out in regard to it this magnificent part of "patron," would be to vivify it! Vivify! Let us say rather save it from itself and its abuses! Art would speedily come to ruin if the whims, fads, and prejudices which creep into the studios were not held in check by the necessity of reckoning with the individual and original judgment of experts.

Alas! this is an evil of our present-day society,-this awful slough of commonplace in which we are floundering— a cause or an effect of our moral degeneration and our utter depravity of taste. Big houses built to a specification, decorated at so much a yard, invisibly heated on some patent system you never heard the name of, peopled by lackeys whom you don't know and only see when they open the doors! Dolly women, clothed by their tailors, a pattern or a copy of their neighbours, with the habits of their callers, the ideas of the men they know, and the conversation of their grooms,-with nothing of their very own; not women at all! People in olden days were so thoroughly persuaded of the real social necessity of forming "amateurs that the old Italian educators of the fifteenth century wished men to be brought up with that end. How much more women, who have leisure and an inborn refinement ! It is very easy to demand that an object, however simple and unpretentious one may suppose it, should bear a stamp of originality and good taste. Is it not at least possible to insist on simplicity in all things, to banish tinsel and brummagem and all our horrible pretentious magnificence ?—to

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