10 NOVEMBER 1888, Page 2

In some of his minor speeches, Mr. Gladstone went back

to a favourite subject of his, the perfect compatibility of utility with beauty in the case of most of the arts and handi- crafts. He gave an amusing account of the extreme ugliness of Birmingham in the old days, when he passed through it as a boy on his way to Eton, and declared that at that period there was no building in the town, great or small, " with which it was possible for a rational being to fill his eyes with satis- faction." But surely he went rather far when he said that the Greeks knew how to make everything that was useful also beautiful. Did the Greeks ever manage to make a butcher's shop beautiful ? or a hoarding covered with advertisements ?