Lord Derby in opening last Wednesday a new School of
Science and Art at Birkenhead, which has been presented by Mr. Laird, the shipbuilder, to the municipality, urged the more thorough training of English artisans in both the theory and practice of " technical " subjects, and then went on to remark that a taste for art would never be adequately 'developed in the unlovely towns of Lancashire,---" the biggest and the ugliest in Europe,"—while they remain as they are, deep in smoke and grime, and beset with the dirt and smells of so many formidable chymical manufactories. All art, he said, imitates nature, and if you disguise nature in an ugly mask, art will hardly have a chance of attaining any true ease and freedom. At a comparatively very small expense, most of the disfiguring elements in the atmosphere due to these mannfactories might be removed, and nothing would conduce more vitally to the true Art- culture of Lancashire. Lord Derby is quite right, but without a
Society to take up the matter, to enforce such laws as we have against these smoke nuisances, and get better passed, nothing will be done. Englishmen do not even know what they lose in losing a bright and pure atmosphere,— do not know that their trees, their houses, their whole external world would grow in meaning in their eyes, and consequently before long in beauty, if they once began to see their real forms and colours, and not merely their coating of smudge.
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