Walpole has with justice remarked, that 'in the commencement of the reign of George I., in 1714, the arts of England were sunk almost to their lowest ebb.' The preceding sketch verifies the observation; and from the singular anomaly of a nation, during the most flourishing period of its literature, possessing a taste absolutely contemptible in the fine arts, evinces the truth of the principles advocated throughout these pages. From the Restoration to the accession of George III., the arts had never once been regarded as adding to national respectability, nor as connected with national feeling. The people crowded to have their portraits taken, without inquiring or conceiving that there was anything to know beyond the mere mechanical art. The sovereign, instead of regarding the progress of elegant taste as an important object of legislation, looked out for a limner merely as a necessary appurtenance of a court. As our monarchs of this period, not even excepting Anne, through the predilections of her husband, were, as regards painting, better acquainted with Continental art, and some more attached to everything foreign, British genius, of course overlooked, was never once called forth. Some stray Italian, Dutchman, or German, was caught hold of, patronised by royalty, supported by the nobility, and never thought of by the nation beyond face-painting in the metropolis. From the middle of the seventeenth to the first forty years of the eighteenth century, when national talent at length began to break forth in its own strength, such was the state of patronage, and the artists who enjoyed its benefits were but little qualified to create a national interest; for their mannerism and foreign modes served only the more decidedly to exclude a characteristic style, and, as must ever be the case in similar instances, prevented any developement of native originality. Another great cause of our wretched taste in the arts, and which perhaps in part grew out of these more general causes, was, that the real genius of the land was bent upon the pursuits of literature and science; while the nation had not attained that degree of refinement, security, and opulence, which enable a people to enjoy and to reward the exertions of mind, as at the present day, in all its separate and diversified departments of action. Between literary eminence and excellence in art there seems a natural connexion, as depending upon principles of taste and modes of exercise nearly similar. Letters and the Fine Arts, then, have generally been carried to the highest perfection among the same people; they have flourished in conjunction, and they have fallen together. It is to be remarked, however, that the former have always preceded; the noblest effusions of poetry have long been the delight of his country before the painter or the sculptor have reached an equal merit. Nor is this casual precedence. The labours of the poet are a necessary, in fact a creative preparation; by their rapid and wide circulation, they soften the sensibilities, arouse the imagination, give to taste an existence and a feeling of its object, and awake the mind to a consciousness of its intellectual wants. They constitute, also, a common chronicle, whether of fiction or of reality, whose events are clear to, and quickly recognisable by all. Fancy thus obtains a lore of its own, whose legends delight by repetition, and whose imagery animates the canvass or the marble with forms loved of old. Poetry, then, must precede art. All this advantage of preparation and expectancy was denied to the infancy of English painting. Milton's verse, not inferior to any precursor of Phidias or of Raphael, instead of being, as Homer's or Dante's, for centuries the manual of his countrymen, was barely known. Dryden, Addison, Pope, were yet but forming the public mind. In many respects, too, even had there not existed artists capable of constituting an epoch, the writings of these distinguished men are not favorable to vigorous originality of thought in art. Their own immediate productions are impressed with the genuine stamp of nationality, but their abstract system of criticism is often timid, almost always conventional; while in every remark on that subject, they show inexperience of the true object and philosophy of art. Even Addison here writes as a mere antiquarian, and Dryden with all the enthusiasm of poetry indeed, but with little of the sober judgment which must guide the more laborious hand and less undefined shapes of the painter. Again, the intellectual temperament and state of society favorable to the arts is directly opposed to those which promote scientific knowledge.