Excerpt from An Address Delivered by William Morris at the Distribution of Prizes to Students of the Birmingham Municipal School of Art on Feb: 21, 1894 All things considered, then, I believe, in a grow, ing sense, that it is a disgrace to a period in which civilized mankind has attained to such master over the forces of Nature, that the commonwealt should be poor. Again, I say that such a feeling is, and must be, the basis of modern Art striving to free itself from the thraldom of utilitarianism, and 'the Correggiosity of Correggio.' How are we to work on that basis? In considering the question, I will, for a while, look upon the hopes of Art in these islands as the subject matter; 86 it is a more than sufficiently big one. And, first, let us dispose of the dictum, which used to be popular in dilet/ tante circles, that the E n glish are essentially a nona artistic people. I must call that a good deal less than a half/truth, 86 you have only got to go to the first (unrestored) mediaeval building you can get at to test that view of the subject. As a matter of fact, until Art failed throughout civilization, the Eng, lish had a very definite style of Art of their own. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.