Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE SOCIETY OF AETS. Like its younger sister in Albemarle Street, the Society of Arts is a notable instance of that drifting faculty which exercises so great an influence on all human institutions. Launched with widely-differing objects on the stream of events, these societies have in a certain measure displaced each other. The Eoyal Institution, now devoted to literature, and in a greater degree to pure science, was originally founded to promote those objects which have been fostered by the elder society, which, drifting away from Art in its highest sense, has taken in hand industrial art, and applied science. One single comparison will demonstrate my meaning. In the beginning of the century —under the auspices of Count Eumford—the Eoyal Institution undertook to improve the dwellings of the working classes, to warm and ventilate workhouses, hospitals, and cottages, and to exhibit and patronizeimprovements in the economical consumption of fuel and the teaching of culinary science. In the present year the Society of Arts, founded originally to encourage young artists, has offered premiums for the best kinds of culinary and domestic warming apparatus, and has directly fostered attempts to instruct the people of England in the best methods of preparing food. The Society of Arts has now existed for a hundred and twenty years, and owes its foundation to Mr. William Shipley, a landscape painter, who, from a " well- grounded persuasion of the extensive utility of the art of drawing to this nation, erected the Academy in the Strand, opposite to Exeter Change." By the efforts of this gentleman a meeting was held in 1754 at Eawthmell's coffee-house, to consider the propriety of establishing a Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. It was resolved t...