Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings with those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the medievals recorded their dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than a single sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pygmy patch of gold. The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature more hasty than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancient artist was serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving the lords. It is that the old artist contrived to convey an impression that colours really were significant and precious things, like jewels and talismanic stones. The colour was often arbitrary; but it was always authoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was silver, if a cloud was scarlet, the artist managed to convey that these colours were important and almost painfully intense: all the red red-hot and all the gold tried in the fire. Now that is the spirit touching colour which the schools must recover and protect if they are really to give the children any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing. It is not so much an indulgence in colour; it is rather, if anything, a sort of fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in heraldry as straitly as a green field in peasant proprietorship.