The Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, the Rev. Mark Patti-
son, delivered yesterday week a sharp ironical attack on the de- generation of English artistic taste, in distributing at Oxford the prizes won by the students in the Schools of Science and Art in connection with South Kensington. We have criticised suf- ficiently the general principles of this address elsewhere, but may add here that, in addition to the remarks on the degeneration in the patterns and tints of the Smyrna carpets imported by modern England—(to the delicate vegetable tints which the Greeks had learnt from the Phcenicians more than 3,000 years ago, had sue- ceeded, said Mr. Pattison, the staring mineral dyes of coal- smoked England)—the speaker made some caustic remarks on the degeneration of Venetian glass under the influence of English middle-class taste. English capital, he said, infused, about twenty years ago, new life into the glass manufactory of Murano, near Venice,—but the beautiful blown-glass of Venice did not sell. The English taste for cut-glass interfered with the demand, and "in order to keep the market" the company was compelled to emulate the English cut-glass. "Mechanism, with its mindless- ness and its precision, has ousted art from Murano. The ruby, the amber, the olive, the acqua-marina, the opal, are still there, but they are vulgarised representatives of the originals ; the bosses and the ritorto look out of place on the transformed material, and the whole product is a kind of cross between the Staffordshire cut and the Venetian blown - glass." Mr. Pattison was also not unjustly severe on our japanned coat- boxes, with the "monstrous vulgarities of their lacquered lids." But when he regards such market " demands " as these as proving that there has been a degeneration of taste within the last thirty years, he probably forgets that the chief consumers of the wares he criticises are a class who have risen from a social position in which, thirty years ago, their predecessors would never have thought of buying such wares at all The rapid diffusion of wealth has rendered the comparison between former and existing conditions of public taste in classes which appear to be the same, completely illusory.
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