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travelling abroad, says, "Another, and a better result," (of foreign travelling) " is the increasing taste for music and painting, and in the latter, a juster taste and finer feeling than has ever yet pre-vailed in this country." He proceeds, "The National Gallery and the King's pictures have been this year fashionable lounge; it was gratifying to see the numbers of elegant women who crowd-ed the rooms from morning till night, *&c." This does not look like decline. But take a familiar example within the reach of every one. Let any one look into the decorated books published in England, some sixty years since, and observe their style of any of the embellished annuals form that country, now so fashionable, and let him say whether painting and engraving are on the decline. I do not cite this example in proof of the highest state of cultiva-tion, but only to show that the arts in England have made great progress in the last century, and it is rather a reason for believing that they will continue to advance, because at the present mo-ment of observation they are not highest, than they will for this reason decline.
Painting and its sister arts of design, then, are not declining. Their place in the march of civilization is in the train of useful arts, and these, their avant couriers, have long and emi-nently occupied a distinguished place in our country. The elegant arts have already landed on our shores, and when their beneficial influence in elevating the character of a nation is more fully ap-preciated; when the absurd notion shall be rejected that they are inimical to liberty, while the atmosphere of a free government, is that only in which they have ever freely breathed; when the truth is felt that our own country, from its very freedom, is the natural habitation of these arts, I do not believe that the opinions of any splenetic or rude legislator, or the forebodings of the po-lished Review will so far influence public opinion, that the na-