ELECBOOK CLASSICS

The Lesser Arts

of Life
William Morris

ISBN 1 84327 015 3

©The Electric Book Company 2001

The Electric Book Company Ltd
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 THE LESSER
ARTS OF LIFE
An Address Delivered in support of the Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

1882

William Morris
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The Lesser Arts of Life 4

The Lesser Arts Of Life

he Lesser Arts of Life may not seem to some of you worth

T considering, even for an hour. In these brisk days of the

world, amidst this high civilisation of ours, we are too eager
and busy, it may be said, to take note of any form of art that does
not either stir our emotions deeply, or strain the attention of the
most intellectual part of our minds.
Now for this rejection of the lesser arts there may be something
to be said, supposing it be done in a certain way and with certain
ends in view; nevertheless it seems to me that the lesser arts, when
they are rejected, are so treated for no sufficient reason, and to the
injury of the community; therefore I feel no shame in standing
before you as a professed pleader and advocate for them, as
indeed I well may, since it is through them that I am the servant of
the public, and earn my living with abundant pleasure.
Then comes the question, What are to be considered the Lesser
Arts of Life? I suppose there might be pros and cons argued on
that question, but I doubt if the argument would be worth the time
and trouble it would cost; nevertheless, I want you to agree with
me in thinking that these lesser arts are really a part of the greater
ones which only a man or two here and there (among cultivated
people) will venture to acknowledge that he contemns, whatever
he real state of the case may be on that matter. The Greater Arts of
Life, what are they ? Since people may use the word in very
different senses, I will say, without pretending to give a definition,
that what I mean by an art is some creation of man which appeals
to his emotions and his intellect by means of his senses. All the

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greater arts appeal directly to that intricate combination of

intuitive perceptions, feelings, experience, and memory which is
called imagination. All artists, who deal with those arts, have these
qualities superabundantly, and have them balanced in such
exquisite order that they can use them for purposes of creation.
But we must never forget that all men who are not naturally
deficient, or who have not been spoiled by defective or perverse
education, have imagination in some measure, and also have some
of the order which guides it; so that they also are partakers of the
greater arts, and the masters of them have not to speak under
their breath to half-a-dozen chosen men, but rather their due
audience is the whole race of man properly and healthily
developed. But as you know, the race of man, even when very
moderately civilised, has a great number of wants which have to
be satisfied by the organised labour of the community. From
father to son, from generation to generation, has grown up a body
of almost mysterious skill, which has exercised itself in making the
tools for carrying on the occupation of living; so that a very large
part of the audience of the masters of the greater arts have been
engaged like them in making things; only the higher men were
making things wholly to satisfy men’s spiritual wants; the lower,
things whose first intention was to satisfy their bodily wants. But
though, in theory, all these could be satisfied without any
expression of the imagination, any practice of art, yet history tells
us what we might well have guessed would be the case, that the
thing could not stop there. Men whose hands were skilled in
fashioning things could not help thinking the while, and soon
found out that their deft fingers could express some part of the
tangle of their thoughts, and that this new pleasure hindered not
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their daily work, for in their very labour that they lived by lay the
material in which their thought could be embodied; and thus
though they laboured, they laboured somewhat for their pleasure
and uncompelled, and had conquered the curse of toil, and were
men.
Here, then, we have two kinds of art: one of them would exist
even if men had no needs but such as are essentially spiritual, and
only accidentally material or bodily. The other kind, called into
existence by material needs is bound no less to recognise the
aspirations of the soul, and receives the impress of its striving
towards perfection.
If the case be as I have represented it, even the lesser arts are
well worthy the attention of reasonable men, and those who
despise them must do so either out of ignorance as to what they
really are, or because they themselves are in some way or other
enemies of civilisation, either outlaws from it or corrupters of it.
As to the outlaws from civilisation, they are those of whom I
began by saying that there are or were people who rejected the
arts of life on grounds that we could at least understand, if we
could not sympathise with the rejecters. There have been in all
ages of civilisation men who have acted, or had a tendency to act,
on some such principle as the following words represent:—The
world is full of grievous labour, the poor toiling for the rich, and
ever remaining poor; with this we, at least, will have nought to do;
we cannot amend it, but we will not be enriched by it, nor be any
better than the worst of our fellows.
Well, this is what may be called the monk’s way of rejecting the
arts, whether he be Christian monk, or Buddhist ascetic, or
ancient philosopher. I believe he is wrong, but I cannot call him
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enemy. Sometimes I can’t help thinking, Who knows but what the
whole world may come to that for a little? The field of art may
have to lie fallow a while that the weeds may be known for what
they are, and be burnt in the end.
I say that I have at least respect for the dwellers in the tub of
Diogenes; indeed I don’t look upon it as so bad a house after all,
with a plane-tree and a clear brook near it, and some chance of
daily bread and onions, it will do well enough. I have seen worse
houses to let for £700 a year. But, mind you, it must be the real
thing. The tub of Diogenes lined with padded drab velvet, lighted
by gas, polished and cleaned by vicarious labour, and expecting
every morning due visits from the milkman, the baker, the
butcher, and the fishmonger, that is a cynical dwelling which I
cannot praise. If we are to be excused for rejecting the arts, it must
be not because we are contented to be less than men, but because
we long to be more than men.
For I have said that there are some rejecters of the arts who are
corrupters of civilisation. Indeed, they do not altogether reject
them; they will eat them and drink them and wear them, and use
them as lackeys to eke out their grandeur, and as nets to catch
money with, but nothing will they learn or care about them. They
will push them to the utmost as far as the satisfying of their
material needs go, they will increase the labour infinitely that
produces material comfort, but they will reach no helping hand to
that which makes labour tolerable; and they themselves are but a
part of the crowd that toils without an aim; for they themselves
labour with tireless energy to multiply the race of man, and then
make the multitude unhappy. Therefore let us pity them, that they
have been born coarse, violent, unjust, inhuman; let us pity them,
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yet resist them.

For these things they do unwitting indeed, but are none the less
oppressors—oppressors of the arts, and therefore of the people,
who have a right to the solace which the arts alone can give to the
life of simple men. Well, these men are, singly or in combination,
the rich and powerful of the world; they rule civilisation at
present, and if it were not through ignorance that they err, those
who see the fault and lament it would indeed have no choice but to
reject all civilisation with the ascetic; but since they are led astray
unwittingly, there is belike a better way to resist their oppression
than by mere renunciation. I say that if there were no other way of
resisting those oppressors of the people—whom we call in modern
slang “Philistines”—save the monk’s or ascetic’s way, that is the
way all honest men would have to take, whose eyes were opened
to the evil. But there is another way of resistance, which I shall ask
your leave to call the citizen’s way, who says: There is a vast deal
of labour spent in supplying civilised man with things which he
has come to consider needful, and which, as a rule, he will not do
without. Much of that labour is grievous and oppressive; but since
there is much more of grievous labour in the world than there
used to be, it is clear that there is more than there need be, and
more than there will be in time to come, if only men of goodwill
look to it; what therefore can we do towards furthering that good
time and reducing the amount of grievous labour; first) by
abstaining from multiplying our material wants unnecessarily; and
secondly, by doing our best to introduce the elements of hope and
pleasure into all the labour with which we have anything to do?
These, I think, are the principles on which the citizen’s
resistance to Philistine oppression must be founded; to do with as
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few things as we can, and, as far as we can, to see to it that these

things are the work of freemen and not of slaves; these two seem
to me to be the main duties to be fulfilled by those who wish to live
a life at once free and refined, serviceable to others, and pleasant
to themselves.
Now it is clear that if we are to fulfil these duties we must take
active interest in the arts of life which supply men’s material
needs, and know something about them, so that we may be able to
distinguish slaves’ work from freemen’s, and to decide what we
may accept and what we must renounce of the wares that are
offered to us as necessaries and comforts of life. It is to help you to
a small fragment of this necessary knowledge that I am standing
before you with this word in my mouth, the Lesser Arts of Life. Of
course it is only on a few of these that I have anything to say to
you, but of those that I shall speak I believe I know something
either as a workman or a very deeply interested onlooker;
wherefore I shall ask your leave to speak quite plainly and without
fear or favour.
You understand that our ground is, that not only is it possible to
make the matters needful to our daily life works of art, but that
there is something wrong in the civilisation that does not do this: if
our houses, our clothes, our household furniture and utensils are
not works of art, they are either wretched make-shifts, or what is
worse, degrading shams of better things.
Furthermore, if any of these things make any claim to be
considered works of art, they must show obvious traces of the
hand of man guided directly by his brain, without more
interposition of machines than is absolutely necessary to the
nature of the work done.
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Again, whatsoever art there is in any of these articles of daily

use must be evolved in a natural and unforced manner from the
material that is dealt with: so that the result will be such as could
not be got from any other material: if we break this law we shall
make a triviality, a toy, not a work of art.
Lastly, love of nature in all its forms must be the ruling spirit of
such works of art as we are considering; the brain that guides the
hand must be healthy and hopeful, must be keenly alive to the
surroundings of our own days, and must be only so much affected
by the art of past times as it is natural for one who practices an art
which is alive, growing, and looking toward the future.
Asking you to keep these principles in mind, I will now, with
your leave, pass briefly over the Lesser Arts with which I myself
am conversant.
Yet, first, I must mention an art which, though it ministers to
our material needs, and therefore, according to what I have said as
to the division between purely spiritual and partly material arts,
should be reckoned among the Lesser Arts, has, to judge by its
etymology, not been so reckoned in times past, for it has been
called Architecture; nevertheless, it does practically come under
the condemnation of those who despise the lesser or more
material arts; so please allow me to reckon it among them.
Now, speaking of the whole world and at all times, it would not
be quite correct to say that the other arts could not exist without
it; because there both have been, and are large and important
races of mankind who, properly speaking, have no architecture,
who are not house-dwellers but tent-dwellers, and who,
nevertheless, are by no means barren of the arts.
For all that it is true that these non-architectural races (let the
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Chinese stand as a type of them) have no general mastery over the

arts, and seem to play with them rather than to try to put their
souls into them. Clumsy-handed as the European or Aryan
workman is (of a good period, I mean) as compared with his
Turanian fellow, there is a seriousness and meaning about his
work that raises it as a piece of art far above the deftness of China
and Japan; and it is this very seriousness and depth of feeling
which, when brought to bear upon the matters of our daily life, is
in fact the soul of Architecture, whatever the body may be; so that
I shall still say that among ourselves, the men of modern Europe,
the existence of the other arts is bound up with that of
Architecture. Please do not forget that, whatever else I may say to-
day, you must suppose me to assume that we have noble buildings
which we have to adorn with our lesser arts: for this art of building
is the true democratic art, the child of the man-inhabited earth,
the expression of the life of man thereon. I claim for our Society no
less a position than this, than in calling on you to reverence the
examples of noble building, and to understand and protect the
continuity of its history, it is guarding the very springs of all art, of
all cultivation.
Now I would not do this noble art such disrespect as to speak of
it in detail as only a part of a subject. I would not treat it so even in
its narrower sense as the art of building; its wider sense I consider
to mean the art of creating a building with all the appliances fit for
carrying on a dignified and happy life. The arts I have to speak of
in more detail are a part, and comparatively a small part, of
Architecture considered in that light; but there is so much to be
said even about these, when we have once made up our mind that
they are worth our attention at all, that you must understand that
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my talk to-night will simply be hints to draw your attention to the

subjects in question.
I shall try, then, to give you some hints on these arts or crafts—
pottery and glass-making; weaving, with its necessary servant
dyeing; the craft of printing patterns (a) on cloth, (b) on paper;
furniture; and also, with fear and trembling, I will say a word on
the art of dress. Some of these are lesser arts with a vengeance;
only you see I happen to know something about them practically,
and so venture to speak of them.
So let us begin with pottery, the most ancient and universal, as
it is perhaps (setting aside house-building the most important of
the lesser arts, and one, too, the consideration of which
recommends itself to us from a more or less historical point of
view, because, owing to the indestructibility of its surface, it is one
of the few domestic arts of which any specimens are left to us of
the ancient and classical times.
Now all nations, however barbarous, have made pottery,
sometimes of shapes obviously graceful, sometimes with a
mingling of wild grotesquery amid gracefulness; but none have
ever failed to make it on true principles, none have made shapes
ugly or base till quite modern times. I should say that the making
of ugly pottery was one of the most remarkable inventions of our
civilisation.
All nations with any turn for art have speedily discovered what
capabilities for producing beautiful form lie in the making of an
earthen pot of the commonest kind, and what opportunities it
offers for the reception of swift and unlaborious, but rich
ornament; and how nothing hinders that ornament from taking
the form of representation of history and legend. In favour of this
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art the classical nations relaxed the artistic severity that insisted
otherwhere on perfection of Figure-drawing in architectural work;
and we may partly guess what an astonishing number there must
have been of capable and ready draughtsmen in the good times of
Greek Art from the great mass of first rate painting on pottery,
garnered from the tombs mostly, and still preserved in our
museums after all these centuries of violence and neglect.
Side by side with the scientific and accomplished work of the
Greeks, and begun much earlier than the earliest of it, was being
practiced another form of the art in Egypt and the Euphrates
valley; it was less perfect in the highest qualities of design, but was
more elaborate in technique, which elaboration no doubt was
forced into existence by a craving for variety and depth of colour
and richness of decoration, which did not press heavily on the
peoples of the classical civilisation, who, masters of form as they
were, troubled themselves but little about the refinements of
colour. This art has another interest for us in the fact that from it
sprang up all the great school of pottery which has flourished in
the East, apart from the special and peculiar work of China.
Though the tactile art of that country is a development of so
much later date than what we have just been considering, let us
make a note of it here as the third kind of potter’s work, which no
doubt had its origin in the exploitation of local material joined to
the peculiar turn of the Chinese workman for finesse of manual
skill and for boundless patience.
Northern Europe during the Middle Ages, including our own
country, could no more do without a native art of pottery than any
other simple peoples; but the work done by them being very
rough, and serving for the commonest domestic purposes (always
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The Lesser Arts of Life 14

with the exception of certain tile-work), had not the chance of

preservation which superstition gave to the Greek pottery, and
very little of it is left; that little shows us that our Gothic
forefathers shared the pleasure in the potter’s wheel and the
capabilities of clay for quaint and pleasant form and fanciful
invention which has been common to most times and places, and
this rough craft even lived on as a village art till almost the days of
our grandfathers, turning out worthy work enough, done in a very
unconscious and simple fashion on the old and true principles of
art, side by side with the whims and inanities which mere fashion
had imposed on so-called educated people.
Every one of these forms of art, with many another which I
have no time to speak of, was good in itself; the general principles
of them may be expressed somewhat as follows:—
1. Your vessel must be of a convenient shape for its purpose.
2. Its shape must show to the greatest advantage the plastic and
easily-worked nature of clay; the lines of its contour must flow
easily; but you must be on the look-out to check the weakness and
languidness that comes from striving after over-elegance.
3. All the surface must show the hand of the potter, and not be
finished with a baser tool.
4. Smoothness and high finish of surface, though a quality not
to be despised, is to be sought after as a means for gaining some
special elegance of ornament, and not as an end for its own sake.
5. The commoner the material the rougher the ornament, but
by no means the scantier; on the contrary, a pot of fine materials
may be more slightly ornamented, both because all the parts of the
ornamentation will be minuter, and also because it will in general
be considered more carefully.
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6. As in the making of the pot, so in its surface ornament, the

hand of the workman must be always visible in it; it must glorify
the necessary tools and necessary pigment: swift and decided
execution is necessary to it; whatever delicacy there may be in it
must be won in the teeth of the difficulties that will result from
this; and because of these difficulties the delicacy will be more
exquisite and delightful than in easier arts where, so to say, the
execution can wait for more laborious patience.
These, I say, seem to me the principles that guided the potter’s
art in the days when it was progressive: it began to cease to be so
in civilised countries somewhat late in that period of blight which
was introduced by the so called Renaissance. Excuse a word or
two more of well-known history in explanation.
Our own pottery of Northern Europe, made doubtless without
any reference to classical models, was very rude, as I have said; it
was fashioned of natural clay, glazed when necessary
transparently with salt or lead, and the ornament on it was done
with another light-coloured clay, sometimes coloured further with
metallic oxides under the glaze. During the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries the more finished work, which had its origin, as
before mentioned, in Egypt and the Euphrates valley, was
introduced into Southern Europe through Moorish or rather Arab
Spain, and other points of contact between Europe and the East.
This ware, known now as Majolica, was of an earthen body
covered with opaque white glaze, ornamented with colours formed
of oxides, some of which were by a curious process reduced into a
metallic state, giving thereby strange and beautiful lustrous
colours.
This art quickly spread through Italy, and for a short time was
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The Lesser Arts of Life 16

practiced there with very great success, but was not much taken
up by the nations of Northern Europe, who for the most part went
on making the old lead or salt glazed earthenware; the latter,
known as Grés de Cologne, still exists as a rough manufacture in
the border lands of France and Germany, though I should think it
is not destined to live much longer otherwise than as a galvanised
modern antique.
When Italy was still turning out fine works in the Majolica
wares, much of the glory of the Renaissance was yet shining; but
the last flicker of that glory had died out by the time that another
form of Eastern art invaded our European pottery. Doubtless the
folly of the time would have found another instrument for
destroying whatever of genuine art was left among our potters if it
had not had the work of China ready to hand, but it came to pass
that this was the instrument that finally made nonsense of the
whole craft among us. True it is that a very great proportion of the
Chinese work imported consisted of genuine works of art of their
kind, though mostly much inferior to the work of Persia,
Damascus, or Granada; but the fact is it was not the art in it that
captivated our forefathers, but its grosser and more material
qualities—the whiteness of the paste, the hardness of the glaze,
the neatness of the painting, and the consequent delicacy, or
luxuriousness rather, of the ware, were the qualities that the
eighteenth century potters strove so hard to imitate. They were
indeed valuable qualities in the hands of a Chinaman, deft as he
was of execution, fertile of design, fanciful though not imaginative;
in short, a born maker of pretty toys; but such daintinesses were of
little avail to a good workman of our race, eager, impatient,
imaginative, with something of melancholy or moroseness even in
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his sport, his very jokes two-edged and fierce, he had other work
to do, if his employers but knew it, than the making of toys.
Well, but in the time we have before us the workman was but
thought of as a convenient machine, and this machine, driven by
the haphazard whims of the time, produced at Meissen, at Sévres,
at Chelsea, at Derby, and in Staffordshire, a most woeful set of
works of art, of which perhaps those of Sévres were the most
repulsively hideous, those of Meissen (at their worst) the most
barbarous, and those made in England the stupidest, though it
may be the least ugly.
Now this is very briefly the history of the art of pottery down to
our own times, when styleless anarchy prevails; a state of things
not so hopeless as in the last century, because it shows a certain
uneasiness as to whether we are right or wrong, which may be a
sign of life. Meanwhile, as to matters of art, the craft which turns
out such tons of commercial wares, every piece of which ought to
be a work of art, produces almost literally nothing. On this dismal
side of things I will not dwell, but will ask you to consider with me
what can be done to remedy it; a question which I know exercises
much many excellent and public-spirited men who are at the head
of pottery works.
Well, in the first place, it is clear that the initiative cannot be
wholly taken by these men; we, all of us I mean who care about the
arts, must help them by asking for the right thing, and making
them quite clear what it is we ask for. To my mind it should be
something like this, which is but another way of putting those
principles of the art which I spoke of before:-
1st, No vessel should be fashioned by being pressed into a
mould that can be made by throwing on the wheel, or otherwise by
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The Lesser Arts of Life 18

hand.
2d, All vessels should be finished on the wheel, not turned in a
lathe, as is now the custom. How can you expect to have good
workmen when they know that whatever surface their hands may
put on the work will be taken off by a machine?
3d, It follows, as a corollary to the last point, that we must not
demand excessive neatness in pottery, and this more especially in
cheap wares. Workmanlike finish is necessary, but finish to be
workmanlike must always be in proportion to the kind of work.
What we get in pottery at present is mechanical finish, not
workmanlike, and is as easy to do as the other is hard: one is a
matter of a manager’s system, the other comes of constant thought
and trouble on the part of the men, who by that time are artists, as
we call them.
4th, As to the surface decoration on pottery, it is clear it must
never be printed; for the rest, it would take more than an hour to
go even very briefly into the matter of painting on pottery; but one
rule we have for a “rude, and whatever we do if we abide by it, we
are quite sure to go wrong if we reject it: and it is common to all
the lesser arts. Think of your material. Don’t paint anything on
pottery save what can be painted only on pottery; if you do, it is
clear that however good a draughtsman you may be, you do not
care about that special art. You can’t suppose that the Greek wall-
painting was anything like their painting on pottery—there is
plenty of evidence to show that it was not. Or, take another
example from the Persian art; it is easy for those conversant with
it to tell from an outline tracing of a design whether it was done for
pottery-painting or for other work.
5th, Finally, when you have asked for these qualities from the
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potters, and even in a very friendly way Boycotted them a little till
you get them, you will of course be prepared to pay a great deal
more for your pottery than you do now, even for the rough work
you may have to take. I’m sure that won’t hurt you; we shall only
have less and break less, and our incomes will still be the same.
Now as to the kindred art of marring glass vessels. It is on much
the same footing as the potter’s craft. Never till our own day has
an ugly or stupid glass vessel been made; and no wonder,
considering the capabilities of the art. In the hands of a good
workman the metal is positively alive, and is, you may say, coaxing
him to make something pretty. Nothing but commercial enterprise
capturing an unlucky man and setting him down in the glass-
maker’s chair with his pattern beside him (which I should think
must generally have been originally designed by a landscape
gardener)—nothing but this kind of thing could turn out ugly
glasses. This stupidity will never be set right till we give up
demanding accurately-gauged glasses made by the gross. I am
fully in earnest when I say that if I were setting about getting good
glasses made, I would get some good workmen together, tell them
the height and capacity of the vessels I wanted, and perhaps some
general idea as to kind of shape, and then let them do their best.
Then I would sort them out as they came from the annealing
arches (what a pleasure that would be!) and I would put a good
price on the best ones, for they would be worth it; and I don’t
believe that the worst would be bad.
In speaking of glass-work, it is a matter of course that I am only
thinking of that which is blown and worked by hand; moulded and
cut glass may have commercial, but can’t have artistic value.
As to the material of the glass vessels, that is a very important
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The Lesser Arts of Life 20

point. Modern managers have worked very hard to get their glass
colourless: it does not seem to me that they have quite succeeded.
I should say that their glass was cold and bluish in colour; but
whether or not, their aim was wrong. A slight tint is an advantage
in the metal, so are slight specks and streaks, for these things
make the form visible. The modern managers of glassworks have
taken enormous pains to get rid of all colour in their glass; to get it
so that when worked into a vessel it shall not show any slightest
speck or streak; in fact, they have toiled to take all character out of
the metal, and have succeeded; and this in spite of the universal
admiration for the Venice glass of the seventeenth century, which
is both specked and streaky, and has visible colour in it. This glass
of Venice or Murano is most delicate in its form, and was certainly
meant quite as much for ornament as use; so you may be sure that
if the makers of it had seen any necessity for getting more
mechanical perfection in their metal they would have tried for it
and got it; but like all true artists they were contented when they
had a material that served the purpose of their special craft, and
would not weary themselves in seeking after what they did not
want. And I feel sure that if they had been making glass for
ordinary table use at a low price, and which ran more risks of
breakage, as they would have had to fashion their vessels thicker
and less daintily they would have been contented with a rougher
metal than that which they used. Such a manufacture yet remains
to be set on foot, and I very much wish it could be done; only it
must be a manufacture; must be done by hand, and not by
machine, human or otherwise.
So much, and very briefly, of these two important Lesser Arts,
which it must be admitted are useful, even to Diogenes, since the
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The Lesser Arts of Life 21

introduction of tea: I have myself at a pinch tried a tin mug for tea,
and found it altogether inconvenient, and a horn I found worse
still; so, since we must have pottery and glass, and since it is only
by an exertion of the cultivated intellect that they can be made
ugly, I must needs wish that we might take a little less trouble in
that direction: at the same time I quite understand that in this case
both the goods would cost the consumers more, even much more,
and that the capitalists who risk their money in keeping the
manufactories of the goods going would make less money; both
which things to my mind would be fruitful in benefits to the
community.
The next craft I have to speak of is that of Weaving: not so
much of an art as pottery and glass-making, because so much of it
must be mechanical, engaged in the making of mere plain cloth; of
which side of it all one need say is that we should have as little
plain cloth made as we conveniently can, and for that reason
should insist on having it made well and solidly, and of good
materials; the other side of it, that which deals with figure-
weaving, must be subdivided into figure-weaving which is carried
out mechanically, and figure-weaving which is altogether a
handicraft.
As to the first of these, its interest is limited by the fact that it is
mechanical; since the manner of doing it has with some few
exceptions varied little for many hundred years: such trivial
alterations as the lifting the warp-threads by means of the
Jacquard machine, or throwing the shuttle by steam-power, ought
not to make much difference in the art of it, though I cannot say
that they have not done so. On the other hand, though mechanical,
it produces very beautiful things, which an artist cannot disregard,
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