NOTES 
 
 ON SOME OF 
 
 PRINCIPAL PICTURES 
 
 EXHIBITED IN THE BOOMS OF THE 
 
 ROYAL ACADEMY: 
 
 1875. 
 
 JOHN EUSKIN, 
 
 VDK PROFESSOR OK FINE ART, AND HON. STUDENT OF CHRISTCHURCH, OXFORD. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 GEORGE ALLEN, SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT, 
 
 AND 
 
 ELLIS AND WHITE, NEW BOND STREET. 
 1875. 
 
 PRICE ONE SHILLING.
 
 Watson and Hazeil, Printers, Lundon and Aylesbury.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IT is now just twenty years since I wrote the 
 first number of these notes ; and fifteen, since 
 they were discontinued. I have no intention of 
 renewing the series, unless occasionally, should 
 accident detain me in London during the spring. 
 But this year, for many reasons, it seemed to 
 me imperatively proper to say as much as is here 
 said. 
 
 And that the temper of the saying may not, 
 so far as I can prevent it, be mistaken, I will 
 venture to ask my reader to hear, and trust that 
 he will believe, thus much concerning myself. 
 Among various minor, but collectively sufficient, 
 reasons for the cessation of these notes, one of 
 the chief was the exclamation of a young artist, 
 moving in good society, authentically, I doubt 
 
 not, reported to me, " D the fellow, why 
 
 doesn't he back his friends ?" The general want 
 in the English mind of any abstract conception
 
 of justice, and the substitution for it of the idea 
 of fidelity to a party, as the first virtue of 
 public action, had never struck me so vividly 
 before ; and thenceforward it seemed to me 
 useless, so far as artists were concerned, to 
 continue criticism which they would esteem 
 dishonourable, unless it was false. 
 
 But Fortune has so sternly reversed her wheel 
 during these recent years, that I am more likely 
 now to be accused of malice than of equity ; and 
 I am therefore at the pains to beg the honest 
 reader to believe, that, having perhaps as much 
 pleasure as other people, both in backing my 
 friends, and fronting my enemies, I have never 
 used, and shall never use, my power of criticism 
 to such end ; but that I write now, and have 
 always written, so far as I am able, what may 
 show that there is a fixed criterion of separation 
 between right art and wrong; that no opinion, 
 no time, and no circumstances can ever in one 
 jot change this relation of their Good and Evil; 
 and that it would be pleasant for the British 
 public to recognize the one, and wise in them 
 to eschew the other. 
 
 HERNE HILL, 
 
 May 23rd, 1875.
 
 NOTES, ETC. 
 
 BEFORE looking at any single picture, let us under- 
 stand the scope and character of the Exhibition 
 as a whole. The Royal Academy of England, 
 in its annual publication, is now nothing more 
 than a large coloured ' Illustrated Times' folded 
 in saloons: the splendidest May Number of 
 the Graphic, shall we call it ? That is to say, 
 it is a certain quantity of pleasant, but im- 
 perfect, " illustration " of passing events, mixed 
 with as much gossip of the past, and tattle of 
 the future, as may be probably agreeable to a 
 populace supremely ignorant of the one, and 
 reckless of the other. 
 
 Supremely ignorant, I say ; ignorant, that is, 
 on the lofty ground of their supremacy in useless 
 knowledge. 
 
 For instance ; the actual facts which Shake- 
 speare knew, about Eome, were, in number and 
 accuracy, compared to those which M. Alma- 
 Tadema knows, as the pictures of a child's first 
 story-book, compared to Smith's Dictionary of 
 Antiquities.
 
 " The noble sister of Publicola, 
 The Moon of Rome ; chaste as the icicle 
 That's curdled by the frost from purest snow, 
 And hangs on Dian's temple," 
 
 he knew Eome herself, to the heart ; and M. 
 Tadema, after reading his Smith's Dictionary 
 through from A to Z, knows nothing of her hut 
 her shadow; and that, cast at sunset. 
 
 Yet observe, in saying that Academy work is 
 now nothing more, virtually, than cheap coloured 
 woodcut, I do not mean to depreciate the talent 
 employed in it. Our puhlic press is supported 
 hy an ingenuity and skill in rapid art, unrivalled 
 at any period of history; nor have I ever been 
 so humbled, or astonished, by the mightiest 
 work of Tintoret, Turner, or Velasquez, as I 
 was one afternoon last year, in watching, in the 
 Dudley gallery, two ordinary workmen for a daily 
 newspaper, finishing their drawings on the blocks 
 by gaslight, against time. 
 
 Nay, not in skill only, but in pretty sentiment, 
 our press illustration, in its higher ranks, far 
 surpasses or indeed, in that department finds 
 no rivalship in the schools of classical art ; 
 and it happens curiously that the only drawing 
 of which the memory remains with me as a 
 possession, out of the old water-colour exhibition 
 of this year, Mrs. Allingham's " Young Cus- 
 tomers," should be, not only by an accomplished 
 designer of woodcut, but itself the illustration of
 
 a popular story. The drawing, with whatever 
 temporary purpose executed, is for ever lovely ; 
 a thing which I believe Gainsborough would have 
 given one of his own pictures for, old-fashioned 
 as red-tipped daisies are, and more precious than 
 rubies. 
 
 And I am conscious of, and deeply regret, the 
 inevitable warp which my own lately exclusive 
 training under the elder schools gives to my 
 estimate of this current art of the day ; and 
 submissively bear the blame due to my sullen 
 refusal of what good is offered me in the rail- 
 road station, because I cannot find in it what I 
 found in the Ducal Palace. And I may be per- 
 mitted to say this much, in the outset, in apology 
 for myself, that I determined on writing this 
 number of Academy notes, simply because I was 
 so much delighted with Mr. Leslie's School, 
 Mr. Leighton's little Fatima, Mr. Hook's Hearts 
 of Oak, and Mr. Couldery's kittens, that I 
 thought I should be able to write an entirely 
 good-humoured, and therefore, in all likelihood, 
 practically useful, sketch of the socially pleasant 
 qualities of modern English painting, which were 
 not enough acknowledged in my former essays. 
 
 As I set myself to the work, and examined more 
 important pictures, my humour changed, though 
 much against my will. Not more reluctantly the 
 son of Beor found his utterances become bene- 
 dictory, than I mine the reverse. But the need 
 of speaking, if not the service, (for too often we can 
 help least where need is most), is assuredly greater
 
 8 
 
 than if I could have spoken smooth things without 
 ruffling anywhere the calm of praise. 
 
 Popular or classic, temporary, or eternal, all 
 good art is more or less didactic. My artist-adver- 
 saries rage at me for saying so ; but the gayest 
 of them cannot help being momentarily grave ; 
 nor the emptiest-headed, occasionally instructive : 
 and whatever work any of them do, that is indeed 
 honourable to themselves, is also intellectually 
 helpful, no less than entertaining, to others. And 
 it will be the surest way of estimating the intrinsic 
 value of the art of this year, if we proceed to 
 examine it in the several provinces which its 
 didactic functions occupy; and collect the sum 
 of its teaching on the subjects, which will, I 
 think, sufficiently embrace its efforts in every 
 kind, of Theology, History, Biography, Natural 
 History, Landscape, and as the end of all, Policy. 
 
 THEOLOGY. 
 
 584. Dedicated to all the Churches. (G. F. 
 Watts, R.A.) 
 
 Here, at least, is one picture meant to teach ; 
 nor failing of its purpose, if we read it rightly. 
 Very beautiful, it might have been ; and is, in no 
 mean measure : but as years pass by, the artist 
 concedes to himself, more and more, the privilege 
 which none but the feeble should seek, of sub-
 
 9 
 
 stituting the sublimity of mystery for that of 
 absolute majesty of form. The relation between 
 this grey and soft cloud of visionary power, and 
 the perfectly substantial, bright, and near presence 
 of the saints, angels, or Deities of early Christian 
 art, involves questions of too subtle interest to be 
 followed here ; but in the essential force of it, 
 belongs to the inevitable expression, in each 
 period, of the character of its own faith. The 
 Christ of the 13th century was vividly present 
 to its thoughts, and dominant over its acts, as 
 a God manifest in the flesh, well pleased in the 
 people to whom He came ; while ours is either 
 forgotten; or seen, by those who yet trust in Him, 
 only as a mourning and departing Ghost. 
 
 129. Ezekiel's Vision. (P. F. Poole, E.A.) 
 Though this design cannot for a moment be 
 compared with the one just noticed, in depth of 
 feeling, there is yet, as there has been always in 
 Mr. Poole's work, some acknowledgment of a 
 supernatural influence in physical phenomena, 
 which gives a nobler character to his storm- 
 painting than can belong to any merely literal 
 study of the elements. But the piece is chiefly 
 interesting for its parallelism with that ' dedicated 
 to all the churches, 'in effacing the fearless realities 
 of the elder creed among the confused specula- 
 tions of our modern one. The beasts in Eaphael's 
 vision of Ezekiel are as solid as the cattle in 
 Smithfield; while here, if traceable at all in the 
 drift of the storm-cloud, (which, it is implied,
 
 10 
 
 was all that the prophet really saw), their animal 
 character can only be accepted in polite com- 
 pliance with the prophetic impression, as the 
 weasel by Polonius. And my most Polonian 
 courtesy fails in deciphering the second of the 
 four not-living, creatures. 
 
 218. Eachel and her Flock. (F. Goodall, E.A.) 
 This is one of the pictures which, with such 
 others as Holman Hunt's " Scapegoat," Millais' 
 "Dove Eeturning to the Ark," etc., the public 
 owe primarily to the leading genius of Dante 
 Eossetti, the founder, and for some years the vital 
 force of the pre-Eaphaelite school. He was the 
 first assertor in painting, as I believe I was myself 
 in art-literature, (Goldsmith and Moliere having 
 given the first general statements of it) of the 
 great distinctive principle of that school, that 
 things should be painted as they probably did 
 look and happen, and not as, by rules of art 
 developed under Eaphael, Correggio, and Michael 
 Angelo, they might be supposed gracefully, 
 deliciously, or sublimely to have happened. 
 
 The adoption of this principle by good and 
 great men, produces the grandest art possible in 
 the world ; the adoption of it by vile and foolish 
 men, very vile and foolish art ; yet not so entirely 
 nugatory as imitations of Eaphael or Correggio 
 would be by persons of the same calibre : an in- 
 termediate and large class of pictures have been 
 produced by painters of average powers ; mostly of 
 considerable value, but which fall again into two
 
 11 
 
 classes, according to the belief of the artists in the 
 truth, and understanding of the dignity of the 
 subjects they endeavour to illustrate, or their 
 opposite degree of incredulity, and materialistic 
 vulgarism of interpretation. 
 
 The picture before us belongs to the higher class, 
 but is not a fine example of it. We cannot tell 
 from it whether Mr. Goodall believes Rachel to 
 have wept over Raman from her throne in heaven; 
 but at least we gather from it some suggestion 
 of what she must have looked like, when she was 
 no more than a Syrian shepherdess. 
 
 That she was a very beautiful shepherdess, so 
 that her lover thought years of waiting but as 
 days, for the love he bore to her, Mr. Groodall has 
 scarcely succeeded in representing. And on the 
 whole he would have measured his powers more 
 reasonably in contenting himself with painting 
 a Yorkshire shepherdess instead of a Syrian one.* 
 Like everybody except myself he has been in the 
 East. If that is the appearance of the new moon 
 in the East, I am well enough content to guide, 
 and gild, the lunacies of my declining years by 
 the light of the old western one. 
 
 518. Julian the Apostate, presiding, etc. (E. 
 Armytage, E.A.) 
 
 This, I presume, is a modern enlightened im- 
 
 * Compare however at once 582, which is, on the whole, the 
 most honourably complete and scholastic life-size figure in the 
 rooms, with well cast, and unaffectedly well painted, drapery.
 
 12 
 
 provement on the Disputa del Sacramento. The 
 English Church is to be congratulated on the 
 education she gives her artists. Fumbling with 
 sham Gothic, penny tracts, and twopenny Scrip- 
 ture prints, among the embers of reverence and 
 sacred life that yet linger on from the soul of 
 ancient days, she holds her own, in outward 
 appearance at least, among our simple country 
 villages ; and, in our more ignorant manufacturing 
 centres, contentedly enamels the service of Mam- 
 mon with the praise of God. But in the capital 
 of England here, on her Vatican hill above St. 
 Peter's church, and beside St. Paul's this is the 
 testimony she wins from art, as compared with the 
 councils of Fathers, and concourses of Saints which 
 poor dark-minded Italy once loved to paint. 
 Mr. Armytage, however, has not completed his 
 satire with subtlety; he knows the higher virtue 
 of sectarians as little as Gibbon knew those of 
 Julian,* whose sincere apostacy was not the act 
 of a soul which could * enjoy the agreeable 
 spectacle ' of vile dispute among any men ; least 
 of all, among those whom he had once believed 
 messengers of Christ. 
 
 1293 1295. Terra-cottas, representing, etc. 
 (S. Tinworth.) 
 
 Full of fire and zealous faculty, breaking its 
 
 way through all conventionalism to such truth as 
 
 it can conceive ; able also to conceive far more 
 
 than can be rightly expressed on this scale. 
 
 * See note on page 59.
 
 13 
 
 And, after all the labours of past art on the 
 Life of Christ, here is an English workman 
 fastening, with more decision than I recollect in 
 any of them, on the gist of the sin of the Jews, 
 and their rulers, in the choice of Barabbas, and 
 making the physical fact of contrast between 
 the man released, and the man condemned, 
 clearly visible. We must receive it, I suppose, 
 as a flash of really prophetic intelligence on the 
 question of Universal Suffrage. 
 
 These bas-reliefs are the most earnest work in the 
 Academy, next to Mr. Boehm's study of Carlyle. 
 But how it happens that after millions of money 
 have been spent in the machinery of art educa- 
 tion at Kensington, an ornamental designer of so 
 high faculty as this one, should never in his life 
 have found a human being able to explain to him 
 the first principles of relief, or show him the 
 difference between decorative foliage -sculpture, 
 and Norman hatchet-work, I must leave the 
 Kensington authorities to explain, for it passes 
 all my capacities of conjecture, and all my hitherto 
 experience of the costly and colossal public insti- 
 tution of Nothing, out of which, to wise men, as 
 here, can come nothing; but to fools everywhere, 
 worse than nothing. Kensington has flattened 
 its thousands of weak students into machine 
 pattern-papers : here, it had a true man to deal 
 with ; and, for all he has learned of his business, 
 he might as well have lived in South Australia.
 
 HISTORY, 
 
 26. The Sculpture Gallery. (L. Alma-Tadema.) 
 
 This, I suppose, we must assume to be the 
 principal historical piece of the year; a work 
 showing artistic skill and classic learning, hoth 
 in high degree. But hoth parallel in their 
 method of selection. The artistic skill has suc- 
 ceeded with all its objects in the degree of their 
 unimportance. The piece of silver plate is 
 painted best ; the griffin bas-relief it stands on, 
 second best ; the statue of the empress worse than 
 the griffins, and the living personages, worse than 
 the statue. I do not know what feathers the 
 fan with the frightful mask in the handle, held 
 by the nearest lady, is supposed to be made of; 
 to a simple spectator they look like peacock's, 
 without the eyes. And, indeed, the feathers, 
 under which the motto ' I serve ' of French art 
 seems to be written in these days, are, I think, 
 very literally, all feather and no eyes, the 
 Raven's feather to wit, of Sycorax. The selec- 
 tion of the subject is similarly one might say, 
 filamentous, of the extremity, instead of the 
 centre. The old French Republicans, reading of 
 Rome, chose such events to illustrate her history, 
 as the battle of Romulus with the Sabines, the vow 
 of the Horatii, or the self-martyrdom of Lucretia. 
 The modern Republican sees in the Rome he 
 studies so profoundly, only a central establishment
 
 15 
 
 for the manufacture and sale of imitation- Greek 
 articles of virtu. 
 
 The execution is dextrous, but more with 
 mechanical steadiness of practice than innate 
 fineness of nerve. It is impossible, however, to 
 say how much the personal nervous faculty of 
 an artist of this calibre is paralysed by his educa- 
 tion in schools which I could not characterize in 
 my Oxford inaugural lectures otherwise than as 
 the ' schools of clay,' in which he is never shown 
 what Venetians or Florentines meant by ' paint- 
 ing,' and allowed to draw his flesh steadily and 
 systematically with shadows of charcoal, and lights 
 of cream-soap, without ever considering whether 
 there would be any reflections in the one, or any 
 flush of life in the other. The head on the ex- 
 treme left is exceptionally good; but who ever 
 saw a woman's neck and hand blue-black under 
 reflection from white drapery, as they are in the 
 nearer figure ? It is well worth while to go 
 straight from this picture to the two small studies 
 by Mr. Albert Moore, 356 and 357, which are 
 consummately artistic and scientific work : ex- 
 amine them closely, and with patience ; the sofa 
 and basket especially, in 357, with a lens of 
 moderate power ; and, by way of a lesson in 
 composition, hide in this picture the little honey- 
 suckle ornament above the head, and the riband 
 hanging over the basket, and see what becomes 
 of everything ! Or try the effect of concealing 
 the yellow flower in the hair, in the ' flower walk.' 
 And for comparison with the elementary method
 
 16 
 
 of M. Tadema, look at the blue reflection on the 
 chin in this figure ; at the reflection of the warm 
 brick wall on its right arm ; and at the general 
 modes of unaffected relief by which the extended 
 left arm in ' Pansies ' detaches itself from the back- 
 ground. And you ought afterwards, if you have 
 eye for colour, never more to mistake a tinted 
 drawing for a painting. 
 
 233. The Festival. (E. J. Poynter, A.) 
 I wonder how long Mr. Poynter thinks a young 
 lady could stand barefoot on a round-runged 
 ladder ; or that a sensible Greek girl would take 
 her sandals off to try, on an occasion when she 
 had festive arrangements to make with care. 
 The ladders themselves, here and in No. 236 
 (The Golden Age), appear to me not so classical, 
 or so rude, in type, as might have been expected ; 
 but to savour somewhat of expeditious gas- 
 lighting. Of course Mr. Poynter's object in 
 No. 236 is to show us, like Michael Angelo, the 
 adaptability of limbs to awkward positions. But 
 he can only, by this anatomical science, interest 
 his surgical spectators ; while the Golden Age, 
 in this pinchbeck one, interests nobody. Not 
 even the painter, for had he looked at the best 
 authorities for account of it, he would have found 
 that its people lived chiefly on corn and straw- 
 berries, both growing wild; and doubtless the 
 loaded fruit-branches drooped to their reach. 
 Both these pictures are merely studies of deco- 
 rative composition, and have far too much pains
 
 17 
 
 taken with them for their purpose. Decorative 
 work, however complete, should be easy. 
 
 401. Eeady ! (P. Cockerell.) 
 
 I suppose this is meant for portrait, not history. 
 At all events, the painter has been misled in his 
 endeavour, if he made any, to render Swiss 
 character, by Schiller's absurd lines. Schiller, of 
 all men high in poetic fame whose works are in 
 any wise known to me, has the feeblest hold of 
 facts, and the dullest imagination. " Still as a 
 lamb ! " Sucking, I suppose ? They are so very 
 quiet in that special occupation ; and never think 
 of such a thing as jumping, when they have had 
 enough, of course ? And I should like to hear a 
 Swiss (or English) boy, with any stuff in him, 
 liken himself to a lamb ! If there were any real 
 event from which the legend sprung, the boy's 
 saying would have been not in the smallest degree 
 pathetic : " Never fear me, father ; I'll stand like 
 grandmother's donkey when she wants him to go," 
 or something to such effect. 
 
 482. The Babylonian Marriage Market. (E. 
 Long.) 
 
 A painting oi great merit, and well deserving 
 purchase by the Anthropological Society. For the 
 varieties of character in the heads are rendered 
 with extreme subtlety, while, as a mere piece of 
 painting, the work is remarkable, in the modern 
 school, for its absence of affectation; there is 
 no insolently indulged indolence, nor vulgarly 
 
 2
 
 18 
 
 asserted 'dexterity, the painting is good through- 
 out, and unobtrusively powerful. 
 
 It becomes a question of extreme interest with 
 me, as I examine this ' remarkable picture, how 
 far the intensely subtle observation of physical 
 character and expression which rendered the 
 painting of it possible, necessitates the isolation 
 of the artist's thoughts from subjects of intel- 
 lectual interest, or moral beauty. Certainly, the 
 best expressional works of the higher schools 
 present nothing analogous to the anatomical 
 precision with which the painter has here gra- 
 dated the feature and expression of the twelve 
 waiting girls, from great physical beauty to 
 absolute ugliness ; and from the serene insolence 
 and power of accomplished fleshly womanhood, 
 to the restless audacity, and crushed resignation, 
 of its despised states of personal inferiority, un- 
 consoled by moral strength, or family affection. 
 As a piece of anthropology, it is the natural 
 and very wonderful product of a century occu- 
 pied in carnal and mechanical science. In the 
 total paralysis of conception without attempt 
 to disguise the palsy as to the existence of any 
 higher element in a woman's mind than vanity 
 and spite, or in a man's than avarice and animal 
 passion, it is also a specific piece of the natural 
 history of our own century ; but only a partial 
 one, either of it, or of the Assyrian, who was 
 once as "the cedars in the garden of God." 
 
 The painter has in the first instance misread 
 his story, or been misled by his translation.
 
 19 
 
 This custom, called wiso by Herodotus, is so 
 called only as practised in country districts with 
 respect to the fortuneless girls of the lower 
 labouring population ; daughters of an Assyrian 
 noble, however plain-featured, would certainly 
 not be exposed in the market to receive dowry 
 from the dispute for their fairer sisters.* But 
 there is matter of deeper interest in the custom, 
 as it is compared to our modern life. However 
 little the English educated classes now read 
 their Bibles, they cannot but, in the present 
 state of literary science, be aware that there is 
 a book, once asserted to have been written by 
 St. John, in which a spiritual Babylon is . de- 
 scribed as the mother of harlots and abomina- 
 tions of the earth, and her ruin represented as 
 lamentable, especially to the merchants, who traf- 
 ficked with her in many beautiful and desirable 
 articles, but above all in " souls of men." 
 
 Also, the educated reader cannot but be aware 
 that the animosity of Christian sects which we 
 have seen the subject of another important 
 national-historical picture in this Academy has 
 for the last three hundred years wasted much of 
 their energy in endeavours to find Scriptural reason 
 for calling each other Babylonians, and whatever 
 else that term may be understood to imply. 
 
 * The passage in Strabo which gives some countenance to the 
 idea of universality in the practice, gives a somewhat different 
 colour to it by the statement that over each of the three great 
 Assyrian provinces a "temperately wise " person was set to con- 
 duct the ordinances of marriage.
 
 20 
 
 There is, however, no authority to be found in 
 honestly read Scripture for these well-meaning, but 
 ignorant, incivilities. Eead in their entirety, the 
 books of the Bible represent to us a literal and 
 material deliverance of a visibly separated people, 
 from a literal bondage ; their establishment in a 
 literally fruitful and peaceful land, and their being 
 led away out of that land, in consequence of their 
 refusal to obey the laws of its Lord, into a literal 
 captivity in a small, material, Babylon. The same 
 Scriptures represent to us a spiritual deliverance 
 of an invisibly separated people, from spiritual 
 bondage ; their establishment in the spiritual land 
 of Christian joy and peace ; and their being led 
 away out of this land into a spiritual captivity in 
 a great spiritual Babylon, the mother of abomina- 
 tions, and in all active transactions especially 
 delightful to ' merchants ' persons engaged, that 
 is to say, in obtaining profits by exchange instead 
 of labour. 
 
 And whatever was literally done, whether ap- 
 parently wise or not, in the minor fleshly Babylon, 
 will, therefore, be found spiritually fulfilled in the 
 major ghostly one, and, for instance, as the most 
 beautiful and marvellous maidens were announced 
 for literal sale by auction in Assyria, are not also 
 the souls of our most beautiful and marvellous 
 maidens announced annually for sale by auction 
 in Paris and London, in a spiritual manner, for 
 the spiritual advantages of position in society?
 
 21 
 
 BIOGBAPHY. 
 
 UNDER this head I include Drama, Domestic 
 Incident, and Portrait : this last heing, if good, 
 the sum of what drama and domestic chances 
 have been wrought by, and befallen to, the person 
 portrayed. 
 
 Not to begin with too high matters, and 
 collapse subsequently, suppose we first contem- 
 plate the pretty little scene, 
 
 408. Domestic Troubles. (J. Burr.) 
 
 The boy peeping in fearfully at the door, has 
 evidently, under the inspiration of modern scien- 
 tific zeal, dissected the bellows, and whether 
 they will ever help the pot to boil again is 
 doubtful to grandpapa. The figure of the younger 
 child, mute with awe, and anxiety, yet not wholly 
 guiltless of his naughty brother's curiosity, is very 
 delightful. Avenging Fate, at the chimneypieec, 
 is too severe. 
 
 I have marked, close by it, two other pictures, 
 403, 405, which interested me for reasons scarcely 
 worth printing. The cloister of Assisi has been 
 carefully and literally studied, in all but what is 
 singular or beautiful in it ; namely, the flattened 
 dome over its cistern, and the central mossy well 
 above. But there is more conscientious treatment 
 of the rest of the building, and greater quietness 
 of natural light than in most picture backgrounds
 
 22 
 
 of these days. Ponte della Paglia, 405, may be 
 useful to travellers in at least clearly, if not quite 
 accurately, showing the decorative use of the 
 angle sculpture of the drunkenness of Noah on the 
 Ducal Palace ; and the Bridge of Sighs is better 
 painted than usual. 
 
 242. A Merrie Jest. (H. S. Marks, A.) 
 
 Very characteristic of the painter's special gift. 
 The difficulty of so subtle a rendering as this 
 of the half-checked, yet extreme mirth of persons 
 naturally humorous, can only be judged of by 
 considering how often aspects of laughter are 
 attempted in pictures, and how rarely we feel 
 ourselves inclined to join in the merriment. The 
 piece of accessory landscape is very unaffected 
 and good, and the painting, throughout, here, as 
 well as in the equally humorous, and useless, 
 picture of bygone days, 166, of good standard 
 modern quality. 
 
 107. The Barber's Prodigy. (J. B. Burgess.) 
 
 A close and careful study of modern domestic 
 drama, deserving notice, however, chiefly for its un- 
 affected manner of work, and moderately pleasant 
 incident, as opposed to over-laboured pictures of 
 what is merely ugly, or meanly faultful, 141, 241, 
 wastes of attention, skill, and time. "Too Good 
 to be True," 153, another clever bit of minor 
 drama, is yet scarcely good enough to be paused 
 at; "Private and Confidential," 375, deserves a
 
 few moments more. 879 (A. Luben) is much 
 surer and finer in touch than anything English 
 that I can find in this sort. The Diisseldorf 
 Germans, and the Neuchatel Swiss have been 
 doing splendid domestic work lately ; but, I sup- 
 pose, are too proud to exhibit here. 
 
 75. Sophia Western. (W. P. Frith, K.A.) 
 The painter seems not to have understood, nor 
 are the public likely to understand, that Fielding 
 means, in the passage quoted, to say that Miss 
 Western's hands were white, soft, translucent, and 
 at the moment, snow-cold. In the picture they 
 cannot be shown to be cold, are certainly not 
 white ; do not look soft ; and scarcely show the 
 light of the fire on them, much less through them. 
 But what is the use of painting from. Fielding at 
 all ? Of all our classic authors, it is he who 
 demands the reader's attention most strictly ; and 
 what modern reader ever attends to anything ? 
 
 88. Loot : 1797. (A. C. Gow.) 
 
 An entirely fine picture of its class, representing 
 an ordinary fact of war as it must occur, without 
 any forced sentiment or vulgar accent. Highly 
 skilful throughout, keenly seen, well painted, and 
 deserving a better place than the slow cart-horses 
 and solid waterfalls on the line have left for it. 
 
 89. War Time. (B. Kiviere.) 
 
 Compare 626, at once ; the first is a true piece
 
 24 
 
 of feeling almost Wordsworthiau ; the second, 
 disgraceful to it, both in the low pitch of its vulgar 
 horror, and in its loss of power, by retreat to 
 picturesque tradition, instead of dealing, like the 
 other, with the facts of our own day. 
 
 If Mr. Biviere really feels as I think he feels ; 
 and means to do good, he must not hope to do 
 anything with people who would endure the sight 
 of a subject such as this. He may judge what 
 they are worth by a sentence I heard as I stood 
 before it. " Last of the garrison ha ! they're all 
 finished off, you see, isn't that well done ? " 
 At all events, if he means to touch them, he 
 must paint the cooking of a French pet-poodle ; 
 not the stabbing of a bloodhound. 
 
 214. The Crown of Love. (J. E. Millais.) 
 Much of the painter's old power remains in this 
 sketch ; (it cannot be called a painting ;) and it is 
 of course the leading one of the year in dramatic 
 sentiment. This, then, it appears, is the best that 
 English art can at the moment, say, in praise of 
 the virtue, and promise of the reward, of Love ; 
 this, the subject of sentimental contemplation 
 likely to be most pleasing to the present British 
 public; torture, namely, carried to crisis of death, 
 in the soul of one creature, and flesh of another. 
 The British public are welcome to their feast ; but, 
 as purchasers, they ought to be warned that, 
 compared with the earlier dual pictures of the 
 school, (Huguenot, Claudio and Isabella, April 
 love, and the like,) this composition balances its
 
 25 
 
 excess of sentiment by defect of industry ; and 
 that it is not a precedent advantageous to them, 
 iri the arrangement of pictures of lovers, that 
 one should have a body without a face, and the 
 other a face without a body. 
 
 47. Hearts of Oak. (J. C. Hook, R.A.) 
 
 Beautiful, but incomplete ; the painter wants 
 more heart of oak himself. If he had let all his 
 other canvasses alone, and finished this, the year's 
 work would have been a treasure for all the cen- 
 turies ; while now, it is only " the Hook of the 
 season." 
 
 It looks right and harmonious in its subdued 
 sunshine. But it isn't. Why should mussel 
 shells cast a shadow ; but boats and hats none ? 
 Why should toy-carts and small stones have light 
 and dark sides ; and tall rocks none ? I fancy all 
 the pictures this year must have been painted in 
 the sunless east wind ; and only a bit of sun- 
 shine put in here and there out of the painter's 
 head, where he thought it would do nobody any 
 harm. 
 
 112. A November Morning, etc. (H. T. Wells, 
 R.A.) 
 
 Fishermen's hearts being of oak, what are 
 huntsmen's hearts made of? 
 
 They will have to ascertain, and prove, soon ; 
 there being question now-a-days among the lower 
 orders, whether they have got any, to speak of.
 
 26 
 
 A pleasant aristocratic picture creditable to 
 Mr. Wells, and trie nobility. Not a Vandyck, 
 neither. 
 
 430. Sunday Afternoon. (E. Collinson.) 
 
 This picture, though of no eminent power in 
 any respect, is extremely delightful to myself ; and 
 ought, I think, to be so to most unsophisticated 
 persons, who care for English rural life ; repre- 
 senting, as it does, a pleasant and virtuous phase 
 of such life, whether on Sunday or Saturday 
 afternoon. 
 
 Why, by the way, must we accept it for Sunday ? 
 Have our nice old women no rest on any other 
 day ? Do they never put on a clean muslin 
 kerchief on any other day ? Do they never read 
 their Bible (of course, it would be improper to 
 suppose any other book readable by them) on any 
 other day? Whatever day it be here, at all 
 events, are peace, light, cleanliness, and content. 
 
 Luxury even, of a kind ; the air coming in at 
 that door must be delicious ; and the leaves, out- 
 side of it, look like a bit of the kitchen-garden 
 side of Paradise. They please me all the better, 
 because, since scientific people were good enough 
 to tell us that leaves were made green by 
 'green-leaf,' I haven't seen a leaf painted green, 
 by anybody. But this peep through the door is 
 like old times, when we were neither plagued 
 with soot, nor science. 
 
 Note, for a little piece of technical study in 
 composition, that the painter would not have been
 
 27 
 
 able to venture on so pure colour outside of the- 
 door, had he not painted the door green as well, 
 only of a modified tint, and so led the subdued 
 colour forward into the red interior, taken up 
 again by the shadows of the plants in the window. 
 The management of the luminous shadow through- 
 out is singularly skilful all the more so because 
 it attracts so little attention. This is true chiaro- 
 scuro ; not spread treacle or splashed mud, speckled 
 with white spots, as a Bernbrandt amateur 
 thinks. 
 
 Mr. Pettie, for instance, a man of real feeling 
 and great dramatic power, is ruining himself 
 by these shallow notions of chiaroscuro. If he 
 had not been mimicking Kembrandt, as well as 
 the "costume of the sixteenth century," in 318, 
 he never would have thought of representing 
 Scott's entirely heroic and tender-hearted Harry 
 of Perth (223), merely by the muscular back 
 and legs of him, (the legs, by the way, were 
 slightly bandy if one holds to accuracy in ana- 
 tomical respects) ; nor vulgarized the real pathos 
 and most subtle expression of his Jacobites, 
 (1217) by the slovenly dark background, corre- 
 sponding, virtually, to the slouched hat of a 
 theatrical conspirator. I have been examining the 
 painting of the chief Jacobite's face very closely. 
 It is nearly as good as a piece of old William 
 Hunt ; but Hunt never loaded his paint, except 
 in sticks, and moss, and such like. Now there's a 
 wrinkle quite essential to the expression, under 
 the Jacobite's eye, got by a projecting ridge of
 
 28 
 
 paint, instead of a proper dark line. Rembrandt's 
 bad bricklayer's work, with all the mortar sticking 
 out at the edges, may be pardonable in a Dutchman 
 sure of his colours ; but it is always licentious ; 
 and in these days, when the first object of manu- 
 facture is to produce articles that won't last, if 
 the mortar cracks, where are we ? 
 
 To return to the question of chiaroscuro. The 
 present Academicians most of whom I have had 
 anxious talk of, with their fathers or friends, when 
 they were promising boys have since been, with 
 the best part of their minds, amusing themselves 
 in London drawing-rooms, or Eastern deserts, in- 
 stead of learning their business ; with the neces- 
 sary result that they have, as a body, qualified 
 themselves rather to be Masters of Ceremonies 
 than of Studies ; and guides rather of Caravans 
 than Schools ; and have not got an inkling of 
 any principle of their art to bless themselves or 
 other people, with. So that they have not only 
 filled their large railroad station and stalls, 
 (attached refreshment room completing the nature 
 of the thing) with a mass of heterogeneous pic- 
 tures, of which at least two-thirds are beneath 
 the level of acceptance in any well established 
 dealer's shop ; * but they have encouraged, by 
 favour of position, quite the worst abuses of the 
 cheap art of the day ; of which these tricks 
 
 * I permit myself to name, for instance, not as worse than 
 others, but as peculiarly disagreeable to myself, because I love 
 monks, herons, and sea, 450, 291, and 837.
 
 29 
 
 of rubbing half the canvas over with black or 
 brown, that the rest may come out handsomer, 
 or that the spectator may be properly, but 
 at the same time economically, prepared for its 
 melancholy or sublime tenour, are among the least 
 creditable either to our English wits or honesty. 
 The portrait, No. 437, for instance, is a very 
 respectable piece of painting, and would have 
 taken its place well in the year's show of 
 work, if the inkstand had not been as evanescent 
 as the vision of Ezekiel, and the library shelves 
 so lost in the gloom of art, as to suggest sym- 
 bolically, what our bishops at home seem so much 
 afraid of, indistinctness in colonial divinity. And 
 the two highly moral pictures, 101 and 335, which 
 are meant to enforce on the public mind the 
 touching theories that, for the labouring poor, 
 grass is not green, nor geese white ; and that 
 on the pastoral poor, the snow falls dirty, might 
 have delivered their solemn message just as 
 convincingly from a more elevated stage of the 
 wall-pulpit, without leaving on the minds of 
 any profane spectator like myself, the impression 
 of their having been executed by a converted 
 crossing- sweeper, with his broom, after it was 
 worn stumpy. 
 
 If the reader is interested in the abstract 
 qualities of art, he wiU find it useful at once 
 to compare with these more or less feeble or 
 parsimonious performances, two pictures which, 
 if not high in attainment, are at least, the one 
 strong, and the other generous. 184. " Peasantry
 
 30 
 
 of Esthonia going to Market," (G. Bochman) is 
 masterly work, by a man practised in his business ; 
 .but who has been taught it in a bad school. It 
 is a true artistic abstraction of grey and angular 
 natural facts ; it indeed omits too much, for 
 even in Esthonia there must be grass some- 
 where, or what could the horses eat ? and it 
 omits the best things and keeps the worst ; but 
 it is done with method, skill, and a conscien- 
 tious notion that to be grey and angular is to 
 be right. And it deserves a place in an Academy 
 exhibition. 
 
 On the other hand, 263. " Getting Better," 
 (C. Calthrop) is an intensely laborious, honest, 
 and intentionally difficult study of chiaroscuro in 
 two lights, on varied colour ; and in all other 
 respects it is well meant, and generously, accord- 
 ing to the painter's power, completed. I won't 
 say more of it, because at the height it hangs 
 I can see no more ; nor must the reader suppose 
 that what I have said implies anything beyond 
 what is stated. All that I certify is, that as a 
 study of chiaroscuro it deserves close attention, 
 much praise, and a better place than it at present 
 occupies. 
 
 336. The Mayor of Newcastle. (W. W. Ouless.) 
 An agreeable and vigorous portrait, highly 
 creditable to the painter, and honourable to its 
 subject and its possessors. Mr. Ouless has 
 adopted from Mr. Millais what was deserving of 
 imitation; and used the skill he has learned to
 
 31 
 
 better ends. All his portraits here are vigorous 
 and interesting. 
 
 221. John Stuart Blackie. (J. Archer.) 
 
 An entirely well-meant, and I should conjecture 
 successful, portrait of a man much deserving por- 
 traiture. The background has true meaning, and 
 is satisfactorily complete ; very notable, in that 
 character, among the portrait backgrounds of the 
 year. The whole is right and good. 
 
 718. The Countess of Pembroke. (E. Clifford.) 
 
 Mr. Clifford evidently means well, and is study- 
 ing in the elder schools ; and painting persons who 
 will permit him to do his best in his own way. 
 
 There is much of interesting in his work, but he 
 has yet to pass through the Valley of Humiliation 
 before he can reach the Celestial Mountains. 
 He must become perfectly simple, before he 
 can be sublime ; above all, he must not hope to 
 be great by effort. This portrait is over-laboured; 
 and, towards the finishing, he has not well seen 
 what he was doing, and has not rightly balanced 
 his front light against that of the sky. But his 
 'drawings always deserve careful notice. 
 
 317. Miss M. Stuart Wortley. (A. Stuart Wort- 
 ley.) 
 
 The Tightest and most dignified female portrait 
 here, as Lady Coleridge's drawing of Mr. New- 
 man, 1069, is the most subtle among those of
 
 32 
 
 the members of learned professions ; (though Mr. 
 Laurence's two beautiful drawings, 1054, 1062, 
 only fall short of it by exhibiting too frankly the 
 practised skill of their execution). 1052 is also 
 excellent ; and, on the whole, thinking over 
 these, and other more irregular and skirmishing, 
 but always well-meant, volunteer work, sprinkled 
 about the rooms, I think the amateurs had 
 better have an Academy of their own next year, 
 in which indulgently, when they had room to 
 spare, they might admit the promising effort of 
 an artist. 
 
 I have scarcely been able to glance round at 
 the portrait sculpture ; and am always iniquitously 
 influenced, in judging of marble, by my humour 
 for praise or dispraise of the model, rather than 
 artist. Guarding myself, as well as I may, from 
 such faultful bias, I yet venture to name 1342 
 as an exemplary piece of chiselling ; carefully and 
 tenderly composed in every touch. If the hair on 
 the forehead were completely finished, this would 
 be a nearly perfect bust. I cannot understand 
 why the sculptor should have completed the little 
 tress that falls on the cheek so carefully ; and yet 
 left so many unmodified contours in the more 
 important masses. 
 
 1301. Thomas Carlyle. (J. E. Boehm.) 
 
 For this noble piece of portraiture I cannot trust 
 
 myself to express my personal gratitude ; nor does 
 
 either the time I can give to these notes, or their 
 
 limited intention, permit me if even otherwise I
 
 33 
 
 could think it permissible to speak at all of the 
 high and harmonious measure in which it seems 
 to me to express the mind and features of my 
 dear Master. 
 
 This only it is within the compass of my present 
 purpose to affirm, that here is a piece of vital 
 and essential sculpture ; the result of sincere 
 skill spent carefully on an object worthy its 
 care : motive and method alike right ; no pains 
 spared ; and none wasted. And any spectator 
 of sensitiveness will find that, broadly speaking, 
 all the sculpture round seems dead and heavy in 
 comparison, after he has looked long at this. 
 
 There must always be, indeed, some difference 
 in the immediate effect on our minds between 
 the picturesque treatment proper in portrait sculp- 
 ture, and that belonging, by its grace of reserve, 
 to classical design. But it is generally a note of 
 weakness in an Englishman when he thinks he 
 can conceive like a Greek : so that the plurality 
 of modern Hellenic Academy sculpture consists 
 merely of imperfect anatomical models peeped 
 at through bath-towels ; and is in the essence 
 of it quite as dull as it appears to be. Let us 
 go back to less dignified work. 
 
 196. School Eevisited. (G. D. Leslie, A.) 
 I came upon this picture early, in my first walk 
 through the rooms, and was so delighted with it 
 that it made me like everything else I saw, that 
 morning ; it is altogether exquisite in rendering 
 some of the sweet qualities of English girlhood ; 
 
 3
 
 34 
 
 and, on the whole, the most easy and graceful 
 composition in the rooms. I had written first, 
 ' masterly ' composition ; but no composition is 
 quite masterly which modifies or subdues any of 
 the natural facts so as to force certain relations 
 between them. Mr. Leslie at present subdues all 
 greens, refuses all but local darks, and scarcely 
 permits himself, even in flesh, colour enough for 
 life. Young ladies at a happy country boarding- 
 school, like this, would be as bright as by the 
 seaside ; and there is no reason why a knowledge- 
 gatherer, well cared for, should be less rosy than a 
 samphire-gatherer. 
 
 Eich colour may be in good taste, as well as 
 the poorest ; and the quaintness, politeness, and 
 grace of Leslie might yet glow with the strength 
 and freshness of Hook. It may perhaps be more 
 difficult than I suppose to get the delicate lines 
 and gradations on which the expression of these 
 girls mainly depends, in deeper colour. But, at all 
 events, the whole should be more in harmony, and 
 more consistently precious. English girls are, per- 
 haps, not all of them, St. Dorothys ; but at least 
 they are good enough to deserve to have their 
 rose-leaves painted about them thoroughly. 
 
 The little thing on the extreme left, with the 
 hoop, is as pleasant a shadow of nature as can be 
 conceived in this kind; and I have no words to 
 say how pretty she is. 
 
 But Mr. Leslie is in the very crisis of his artist 
 life. His earlier pictures were finer in colour 
 and colour is the soul of painting. If he could
 
 35 
 
 resolve to paint thoroughly, and give the colours 
 of Nature as they are, he might he a really great 
 painter, and almost hold, to Bonifazio, the position 
 that Reynolds held to Titian. But if he subdues 
 his colour for the sake of black ribands, white 
 dresses, or faintly idealized faces, he will become 
 merely an Academic leaf of the ' Magazin des 
 Modes.' 
 
 For the present, however, this picture, and the 
 clay portrait of Carlyle, are, as far as my review 
 reaches, the only two works of essential value in 
 the Exhibition of this year, that is to say, the 
 only works of quietly capable art, representing 
 what deserved representation. 
 
 English girls, by an English painter. Whether 
 you call them Madonnas, or saints or what not, 
 it is the law of art-life ; your own people, as 
 they live, are the only ones you can understand. 
 Only living Yenice, done by Venetian, living 
 Greece by Greek living Scotland, perhaps, which 
 has much loved Germany, by living Germany 
 which has much reverenced Scotland : such ex- 
 pansion of law may be granted ; nay, the strange- 
 ness of a foreign country, making an artist's 
 sight of it shrewd and selective, may produce a 
 sweet secondary form of beautiful art ; your 
 Spanish Lewis your French Prout your Italian 
 Wilson and their like, 'Second-rate nevertheless, 
 always. Not Lewis, but only Velasquez, can paint 
 a perfect Spaniard; not Wilson, nor Turner, 
 but only Carpaccio, can paint an Italian land- 
 scape ; and, too fatally, the effort is destructive to
 
 36 
 
 the painters, beyond all resistance ; and Lewis 
 loses his animal power among the arabesques of 
 Cairo ; Turner, his Yorkshire honesty at Eome ; 
 and Holman Hunt painting the Light of the 
 World in an English orchard paints the gaslight 
 of Bond Street in the Holy Land. 
 
 English maids, I repeat, by an English painter : 
 that is all that an English Academy can pro- 
 duce of loveliest. There's another beautiful little 
 one, by Mr. Leighton, with a purple drapery 
 thrown over her, that she may be called Eatima, 
 (215, and 345), who would have been quite infi- 
 nitely daintier in a print frock, and called Patty. 
 And I fear there are no more, to speak of, by 
 artists,* this year ; the two vivid sketches, 222, 
 262, being virtually put out of court by their 
 coarse work. (Look close at the painting of the 
 neck, in the one, and of the left hand, in the 
 other.) Of English men, there is the Mayor, 
 and the Chemist ; a vigorous squire or two, and 
 the group of grand old soldiers at Greenwich 
 a most notable, true, pathetic study ; but scarcely 
 artistic enough to be reckoned as of much more 
 value than a good illustrative woodcut. Mr. 
 Watts' portraits are all conscientious and subtle, 
 and of great present interest, yet not realistic 
 enough to last. Exclusively I return to my 
 Carlyle and the schoolgirls, as, the one, sure to 
 abide against the beating of the time stream ; 
 and the other, possibly floating on it, discernible 
 as a flower in foam. 
 
 * But see note on 317, p. 31.
 
 37 
 
 NATURAL HISTORY. 
 
 THERE ought to be a separate room in our Academy 
 for the exhibition of the magnificent work in 
 scientific drawing and engraving, done, at present, 
 almost without public notice, for the illustrations 
 of great European works on Palaeontology, 
 Zoology, and Botany. The feeling, on the part 
 of our artists, that an idle landscape sketch, or 
 a clever caricature, may be admitted into their 
 rooms as "artistic"; and that work which the 
 entire energy of early life must be given to learn, 
 and of late life to execute is to be excluded, 
 merely because it is thoroughly true and useful, 
 is I hope likely to yield, some day, to the scientific 
 enthusiasm which has prevailed often where it 
 should have been resisted, and may surely there- 
 fore conquer, in time, where it has honourable 
 claims. 
 
 There is nothing of the kind, however, to be 
 seen here, hitherto : but I may direct attention 
 under this head, rather than that of landscape, 
 to the exquisite skill of delineation with which 
 Mr. Cooke has finished the group of palm trees 
 in his wonderful study of Sunset at Denderah. 
 (443.) The sacrifice of colour in shadow for the 
 sake of brilliancy in light, essentially a principle 
 of Holland as opposed to Venice, is in great 
 degree redeemed in this picture by the extreme 
 care with which the relations of light are observed 
 on the terms conceded : but surely, from so low
 
 38 
 
 sunset, the eastern slopes of the mountains on 
 the left could not have been reached by so many 
 rays? 
 
 To this division of our subject also must be 
 referred Mr. Brett's " Spires and Steeples of the 
 Channel Islands " (497), but with less praise, for 
 since the days when I first endeavoured to direct 
 the attention of a careless public to his conscien- 
 tious painting of the Stonebreaker and Wood- 
 cutter, he has gained nothing rather, I fear, lost, 
 in subtlety of execution, and necessitates the 
 decline of his future power by persistently cover- 
 ing too large canvas. There is no occasion that 
 a geological study should also be a geological 
 map ; and even his earlier picture, which I am 
 honoured in possessing, of the Val d'Aosta, would 
 have been more precious to me if it had been 
 only of half the Val d'Aosta. 
 
 The extreme distance here, however, beyond the 
 promontory, is without any question the best bit 
 of sea and atmosphere in the rooms. The paint 
 on the water surface in the bay is too loaded ; 
 but laid with extreme science in alternations of 
 colour. 
 
 At a still lower level, though deserving some 
 position in the Natural History class for its 
 essential, though rude, and apparently motiveless, 
 veracity, must be placed " The Fringe of the 
 Moor." (74.) 
 
 But why one should paint the fringe of the 
 moor, rather than the breadth of it, merely for 
 ,the privilege of carrying an ugly wooden fence
 
 39 
 
 all across the foreground, I must leave modern 
 sentimentalists and naturalists to explain. Yes- 
 tiges of the painter's former power of seeing 
 true colour remain in the iridescent distance, 
 but now only disgrace the gentle hillsides with 
 their coarseness of harlequinade ; and the daubed 
 sky daubed without patience even to give unity 
 of direction to the bristle marks -seems to have 
 been wrought in obtrusive directness of insult to 
 every master, principle and feeling, reverenced, or 
 experienced, in the schools of noble art, from its 
 nativity to this hour. 
 
 And, closing the equivocal group of works in 
 which Naturalism prevails unjustly over art, I am 
 obliged to rank Mr. Leighton's interesting study 
 of man in his Oriental function of scarecrow, 
 (symmetrically antithetic to his British one of 
 game-preserver) 398. It is, I do not doubt, 
 anatomically correct ; and, with the addition of 
 the corn, the poppies, and the moon, becomes 
 semi- artistic ; so that I feel much compunction 
 in depressing it into the Natural History class ; 
 and the more, because it partly forfeits its claim 
 even to such position, by obscuring in twilight 
 its really valuable delineation of the body, and 
 disturbing our minds, in the process of scien- 
 tific investigation, by sensational effects of after- 
 glow, and lunar effulgence, which are disadvan- 
 tageous, not to the scientific observer only, but 
 to less learned spectators : for when simple 
 and superstitious persons like myself, greatly 
 susceptible to the influence of low stage lamps
 
 40 
 
 and pink side-lights, first catch sight of the 
 striding figure from the other side of the room, 
 and take it, perhaps, for the angel with his right 
 foot on the sea and his left foot on the earth, 
 swearing there shall be Time no longer ; or for 
 Achilles alighting from one of his lance-cast- 
 long leaps on the shore of Scamander ; and find, 
 on near approach, that all this grand straddling, 
 and turning down of the gas, mean, practically, 
 only a lad shying stones at sparrows, we are hut 
 too likely to pass on petulantly, without taking 
 note of what is really interesting in this Eastern 
 custom and skill; skill which I would recommend 
 with all my heart to the imitation of the British 
 game preserver aforesaid, when the glorious end 
 of Preservation is to be accomplished in Battue. 
 Good slinging would involve more healthy and 
 graceful muscular action than even the finest 
 shooting; and might, if we fully followed the 
 Eastern example, be most usefully practised in 
 other periods of the year, and districts of England, 
 than those now consecrated to the sports of our 
 aristocracy. I cannot imagine a more edifying 
 spectacle than a British landlord in the middle 
 of his farmer's cornfield, occupied in this entirely 
 patriotic method of Protection. 
 
 The remainder of the pictures which I have to 
 notice as belonging to the domain of Natural 
 History, are of indubitable, though unpretending, 
 merit : they represent indeed pure Zoology in 
 its highest function of Animal Biography, which 
 scientific persons will one day find requires much
 
 41 
 
 more learned investigation of its laws than the 
 Thanatography which is at present their exclusive 
 occupation and entertainment. 
 
 414. A Fascinating Tail. (H. H. Couldery.) 
 
 Quite the most skilful piece of minute and 
 Dureresque painting in the exhibition (it cannot 
 be rightly seen without a lens) ; and in its sym- 
 pathy with kitten nature, down to the most 
 appalling depths thereof, and its tact and sen- 
 sitiveness to the finest gradations of kittenly 
 meditation and motion, unsurpassable. It seems 
 hard to require of a painter who has toiled so 
 much, that, for this very reason, he should toil 
 the more. But " The Little Epicure " (169) can- 
 not be considered a picture till the cabbage leaves 
 are as perfect as the fish. 
 
 1234. The First Taste. (S. Carter.) 
 
 Altogether enjoyable to me ; and I am prepared 
 to maintain (as a true lover of dogs, young and 
 old), against all my heroic and tragically-minded 
 friends, that this picture is exemplary in its choice 
 of a moment of supreme puppy felicity as properest 
 time for puppy portraiture. And I thankfully 
 and with some shame for my generally too great 
 distrust of modern sentiment acknowledge, before 
 it, that there is a real element of fine benevolence 
 towards animals, in us, advanced quite infinitely, 
 and into another world of feeling, from the days 
 of Snyders and Eubens. " The Little Wanderers "
 
 42 
 
 (1173), by this same painter, are a most pathetic 
 and touching group of children in the wood. You 
 may see, if you will take your opera-glass to it, 
 that the robin is even promising to cover them 
 with leaves, if indeed things are to end, as seems 
 too probable. And compare, by the way, the still 
 more meek and tender human destitution, " To 
 be Left till Called for," 83, which I am ashamed 
 of myself for forgetting, as one of the pretty things 
 that first encouraged me to write these notes. 
 " Nobody's Dog" may console us with his more 
 cynical view of his position in the wide world; 
 and finally, Miss Acland's Platonic puppy, (737) 
 shows us how events of the most unexpected, and 
 even astounding, character, may be regarded, by a 
 dog of sense, with entire moral tranquillity, and 
 consequently with undisturbed powers of reflec- 
 tion and penetration. 
 
 How strange that I cannot add to my too short 
 list of animal studies any, however unimportant, 
 of Birds ! (I do not count as deserving notice at 
 all, dramatic erlects of vulture, raven, etc.) Not 
 a nest not a plume ! English society now caring 
 only for kingfishers' skins on its hat, and plovers' 
 eggs on its plate.
 
 43 
 
 LANDSCAPE. 
 
 THE distinction between Natural Historic painting 
 of scenery and true Landscape, is that the one 
 represents objects as a Government Surveyor does, 
 for the sake of a good account of the things 
 themselves, without emotion, or definite purpose 
 of expression. Landscape painting shows the 
 relation between nature and man ; and, in fine 
 work, a particular tone of thought in the painter's 
 mind respecting what he represents. 
 
 I endeavoured, thirty years ago, in ' Modern 
 Painters,' to explain this difference briefly, by 
 saying that, in Natural History painting, the artist 
 was only the spectator's horse ; but, in Landscape 
 painting, his friend. 
 
 The worst of such friendliness, however, is that 
 a conceited painter may at last leave Nature out 
 of the question altogether, and talk of himself 
 only; and then there is nothing for it but to go 
 back to the Government Surveyor. Mr. Brett, 
 in his coast scene above noticed, gives us things, 
 without thoughts ; and the fuliginous moralists 
 above noticed, thoughts such as they are 
 without things : by all means let us rather 
 have the geographical synopsis. 
 
 415. Hoppers on the Eoad. (W. Linnell.) 
 
 This is a landscape, however ; and, if it were 
 more lightly painted, we might be very happy
 
 44 
 
 with it. Mr. Linnell cares no more than his 
 father for brush-dexterity ; but he does no worse 
 now, in that part of the business, than every one 
 else. And what a relief it is, for any wholesome 
 human sight, after sickening itself among the 
 blank horrors of dirt, ditch-water, and malaria, 
 which the imitators of the French schools have 
 begrimed our various exhibition walls with, to 
 find once more a bit of blue in the sky, and 
 a glow of brown in the coppice, and to see that 
 Hoppers in Kent can enjoy their scarlet and 
 purple like empresses and emperors ! 
 
 1199. Summer Days for Me. (A. W. Hunt.) 
 I am at some pause in expressing my pleasure 
 in the realization of this beautiful scene, because 
 I have personal interest in it, my own favourite 
 summer walk being through this very field. As, 
 however, I was far away at Assisi when the artist 
 painted it, and had nothing whatever to do with 
 either the choice or treatment of his subject, it is 
 not indecorous for me to praise a work in which 
 I am able so securely to attest a fidelity of por- 
 traiture, happily persisted in without losing the 
 grace of imagination. 
 
 It is the only picture of the year which I saw 
 in the studio ; and that by chance ; for it is one 
 of my fixed laws not to look at pictures before 
 they take their fair trial in the Academy. But 
 I ventured to find fault with the sky. The sky 
 was courteously changed to please me ; but I am 
 encroaching enough to want it changed more.
 
 45 
 
 "Summer days are" not " for me" unless the 
 sky is blue in them, and especially unless it looks 
 what simple mortals too often make it in reality, 
 a great way off. I want this sky to look bluer 
 at the top, and farther away at the bottom. The 
 brook on the right is one of the very few pieces 
 of stream which, this year, have been studied for 
 their beauty, not their rage. 
 
 256. Wise Saws. (J. C. Hook, E.A.) 
 I suspect that many, even of the painter's 
 admirers, pass this pretty sketch without no- 
 ticing the humour with which he has expressed 
 the gradations of feminine curiosity, scientific at- 
 tention, and conscientious sense of responsibility, 
 in the faces of the troop of cows who approach to 
 investigate the nature of the noisy phenomenon 
 upon the palings. It is a charming summer 
 sketch, but scarcely worth sending to the Aca- 
 demy ; and time was wasted by the good painter 
 in carrying so far, what he felt his skill would 
 be misapplied in carrying farther. 
 
 I am sure that Mr. Hook cannot lately have 
 been reading his Richard II. : but, whether the 
 line quoted for his motto chanced idly to occur 
 to his memory, or was suggested to him by some 
 acquaintance, he will, I trust, find a more decorous, 
 as he easily may a more amusing, motto for his 
 pretty cattle piece, before it becomes known in 
 the picture market as the parody of one of the 
 most pathetic utterances in all Shakespearian 
 tragedy.
 
 46 
 
 123. On the Elver Mole. (Birket Foster.) 
 
 In doubt whether the spectator, without assist- 
 ance, would see all the metaphysical distinctions 
 between the cows in Mr. Hook's landscape, I need 
 a more keen-sighted spectator's assistance to tell 
 me, in Mr. Foster's, whether those animals on the 
 opposite bank of the Mole are cows at all. If so, 
 the trunks of the trees in the hedge beyond are 
 about twenty yards in girth. What do our good 
 water-colour painters mean by wasting their time 
 in things like this, (and I could name one or two 
 who have done worse,) for the sake of getting their 
 names into the Academy catalogue ? 
 
 69, 81. The Horse-dealer. Crossing the Moor. 
 
 I have not looked long enough at these to 
 justify me in saying more of them than that they 
 should not be here on the line. That much I 
 must say ; and emphatically. 
 
 265. (I venture to supply a title, the painter 
 seeming to have been at a loss.) A Wild Rose, 
 remarkable in being left on its stalk, demonstrates 
 to the poet Campbell that there has been a garden 
 in this locality. 
 
 Little thought I, when I wrote the first line of 
 1 Modern Painters,' that a day would come when 
 I should have to say of a modern picture what I 
 must say of this. When I began my book, Wilkie 
 was yet living ; and though spoiled by his Spanish 
 ambition, the master's hand was yet unpalsied, nor
 
 47 
 
 had lost its skill of practice in its pride. Turner 
 was in his main colour-strength, and the dark 
 room of the Academy had, every year, its four or 
 five painted windows, bright as the jewel case- 
 ments of Aladdin's palace, and soft as a king- 
 fisher's wings. Mulready was at the crowning 
 summit of his laborious skill ; and the " Burchell 
 and Sophia in the Hayfield," and the " Choosing 
 of the Wedding Dress," remain in my mind 
 as standards of English effort in rivalship with 
 the best masters of Holland. Constable's clumsy 
 hand was honest, and his flickering sunshine 
 fair. Stanfield, sea-bred, knew what a ship was, 
 and loved it ; knew what rocks and waves were, 
 and wrought out their strength and sway with 
 steadiest will. David Roberts, though utterly 
 destitute of imagination, and incapable of colour, 
 was at least a practised draughtsman in his own 
 field of architectural decoration ; loved his Burgos 
 or Seville cathedral fronts as a woman loves lace ; 
 and drew the details of Egyptian hieroglyph with 
 dutiful patience, not to show his own skill, but to 
 keep witness of the antiquity he had the wisdom 
 to reverence ; while, not a hundred yards from the 
 Academy portico, in the room of the old water- 
 colour, Lewis was doing work which surpassed, 
 in execution, everything extant since Carpaccio ; 
 and Copley-Fielding, Eobson, Cox, and Prout were 
 every one of them, according to their strength, 
 doing true things with loving minds. 
 
 The like of these last-named men, in simplicity 
 and tenderness of natural feeling, expressing itself
 
 48 
 
 with disciplined (though often narrow) skill, does 
 not, so far as I can see, now exist in the ranks 
 of art-labourers ; and even of men doing their 
 absolute best according to their knowledge, it 
 would be difficult to find many among the most 
 renowned exhibitors of London and Paris ; while 
 here, full on the line, with highest Academic 
 name, and hailed by explosive applause from the 
 
 whole nation, here is 1 cannot use strength 
 
 of words enough to tell you what it is, unless 
 you will first ascertain for yourselves what it is 
 not. 
 
 Get what good you can of it, or anything else 
 in the rooms to-day ; but to-morrow, or when next 
 you mean to come to the Academy, go first for 
 half an hour into the National Gallery, and look 
 closely and thoroughly at the painting of the 
 soldier's helmet, and crimson plume in John 
 Bellini's Peter Martyr ; at the horse-bridle in the 
 large, nameless Venetian picture of the Madonna 
 and kneeling Knight ; at the herbage in the fore- 
 ground of Mantegna's Madonna ; and at Titian's 
 columbines and vine in the Bacchus and Ariadne. 
 All these are examples of tnie painter's work in 
 minor detail ; unsurpassable, but not, by patience 
 and modesty, inimitable. There was once a day 
 when the painter of this (soi-disant) landscape 
 promised to do work as good. If, coming straight 
 from that to this, you like this best, be properly 
 thankful for the blessings of modern science and 
 art, and for all the good guidance of Kensington 
 and Messrs. Agnew. But if you think that the
 
 49 
 
 four-petalled rose, the sprinkle of hips looking like 
 ill-drawn heather, the sundial looking like an ill- 
 drawn fountain, the dirty birch-tree, and the rest 
 whatever it is meant for of the inarticulate 
 brown scrabble, are not likely to efface in the eyes 
 of future generations the fame of Venice and 
 Etruria, you have always the heroic consolation 
 given you in the exclamation of the c Spectator ' 
 " If we must choose between a Titian and a 
 Lancashire cotton mill give us the cotton 
 mill." ' 
 
 Literally, here you have your cotton mill em- 
 ployed in its own special Art-produce. Here you 
 have, what was once the bone and sinew of a 
 great painter, ground and carded down into black- 
 podded broom-twigs. That is what has come to 
 pass upon him ; that, his finding on his ' ruinous 
 walk ' over the diabolic Tom Tidier 's ground of 
 Manchester and Salford. Threshed under the 
 mammon flail into threads and dust, and shoddy- 
 fodder for fools ; making manifest yet, with what 
 ragged remnant of painter's life is in him, the 
 results of mechanical English labour on English 
 land. Not here the garden of the sluggard, green 
 with frank weeds ; not here the garden of the 
 Deserted Village, overgrown with ungathered balm ; 
 not here the noble secrecy of a virgin country, 
 where the falcon floats and the wild goat plays ; 
 but here the withering pleasance of a fallen race, 
 who have sold their hearths for money, and their 
 glory for a morsel of bread.
 
 50 
 
 231. The Quarries of Holmeground. (J. S. 
 Kaven.) 
 
 The painter has real feeling of the sublimity of 
 hill forms, and has made the most of his Langdale 
 pikes. But it is very wonderful that in all this 
 Academy, so far as I have yet seen, there is not 
 a single patient study of a mossy rock. Now the 
 beauty of foreground stone is to be mossy, as the 
 beauty of a beast is to be furry ; and a quarried 
 rock is to a natural one what a skinned leopard 
 is to a live one. Even if, as a simple painter, 
 and no huntsman, one liked one's leopard or tiger 
 better dead than alive, at least let us have him 
 dead in his integrity; or if so much as that 
 cannot be, for pictorial purpose it is better to 
 have, as in No. 697, the skin without the tiger, 
 than, as here, the tiger without the skin. (No. 
 697, by the way, should have been named in 
 the Natural History class, for a good study as far 
 as it reaches, and there may be more substantial 
 drawing in it than I can see at the height 
 where it is hung.) 
 
 Another sorrowful character in the mountain- 
 painting of this year, is the almost total absence 
 of any attempt to render calm and full sunshine. 
 564 and 368 are, I think, the only exceptions, though 
 scarcely worth noticing except as such ; unless 
 the latter, for the extreme and singular beauty of 
 the natural scene it represents. The " Mountain 
 Twilight," 759, W. C. Eddington, is evidently a 
 pure and careful study of evening air among noble 
 hills. What an incomparably ridiculous mob this
 
 51 
 
 London mob is ! to let some square leagues of 
 room lie about its metropolis in waste brickfield, 
 and occupy immeasurable space of wall with 
 advertisements of pills and pictures of newly- 
 opened shops ; and lift a lovely little drawing like 
 this simply out of its way. 
 
 237. Kichmond Hill. (Yicat Cole, A.) 
 The passages on the left, under the trees, of 
 distant and subdued light, in their well-studied 
 perfection, are about the most masterly things in 
 landscape work in this exhibition ; but has the 
 painter never in his life seen the view from 
 Eichmond Hill on a clear day ? Such a thing is 
 still possible ; and when it happens, is the time 
 to paint that distance, or at least, (for the passages 
 on the left imply mist), when the indistinctness 
 of it may be in golden mist, not gas fume. The 
 last line quoted from Thomson seems to have 
 been written prophetically, to describe the England 
 of our own day. But Thomson was never thinking 
 of real smoke when he wrote it. He was as far 
 from imagining that English landscape would ever 
 be stifled in floating filth, as that the seasons 
 should stop rolling, or April not know itself from 
 November. He means merely the warm mist of an 
 extreme horizon ; and has at least given us some- 
 thing to look at before we come to it. What has 
 Mr. Yicat Cole done with all those hills, and dales, 
 and woods, and lawns, and spires, which he leads 
 us to expect ? 
 
 I think I never saw a large picture so much
 
 52 
 
 injured by a little fault, as this is by the white 
 wake of the farthest boat on the river. As a 
 fact, it is impossible ; as a white line, it cuts 
 all to pieces. 
 
 651. The Head of a Highland Glen. (F. C. 
 Newcome.) 
 
 The best study of torrent, including distant and 
 near water, that I find in the rooms : 1075 has 
 been most carefully and admirably studied from 
 nature by Mr. Kaven : only what is the use of 
 trying to draw water with charcoal ? and w T hat 
 makes nearly all the painters this year choose 
 to paint their streams in a rage, and foul with 
 flood, instead of in their beauty, and constant 
 beneficence ? Our manufacturers have still left, 
 in some parts of England and Scotland, streams 
 of what may be advertised in the bills of Natural 
 Scenery as ' real water ' ; and I myself know 
 several so free from pollution that one can sit 
 near them with perfect safety, even when they 
 are not in flood. 
 
 The rest of this mountain scene by Mr. 
 Newcome is also carefully studied, and very right 
 and good. 
 
 756. The Llugwy at Capel Curig. (I. J. 
 Curnock.) 
 
 I find this to be the most attentive and refined 
 landscape of all here ; too subdued in its tone for 
 my own pleasure, but skilful and affectionate in
 
 53 
 
 a high, degree ; and one of the few exceptions to 
 my general statement ahove made ; for here is a 
 calm stream patiently studied. The distant woods 
 and hills are all very tender and beautiful. 
 
 636 is also a singularly careful and unassumingly 
 true drawing ; but are the town and rail not 
 disquieted enough, that we should get no rest 
 in a village ? 
 
 POLICY. 
 
 WE finally inquire what our British artists have 
 to say to us on the subject of good Govern- 
 ment, and its necessary results ; what triumph 
 they express in the British Constitution and its 
 present achievements. 
 
 In old times, all great artistic nations were 
 pictorially talkative, chiefly, next to religion, on 
 the subject of Government. Venice, Florence, and 
 Siena did little else than expound, in figures and 
 mythic types, the nature of civic dignity, states- 
 manly duty, and senatorial or soldierly honour; 
 and record, year by year, the events conducive to 
 their fame. 
 
 I have not exhaustively overlooked the Academy; 
 but, except Miss Thompson's study of a battle 
 fought just " sixty years since," I find no English 
 record of any important military or naval achieve- 
 ment ; and the only exhibition of the mode in
 
 54 
 
 which Britannia at present rules the waves, is 
 Mr. Cooke's "Devastation" heing reviewed; 
 somewhat sahle and lugubrious as a national 
 spectacle, dubious as a national triumph, and 
 to myself, neither in colour nor sentiment enjoy- 
 able, as the pictures of Victorys and Temeraires 
 one used to see in days of simpler warfare. And 
 of political achievement there seems still less 
 consciousness or regard in the British artist ; so 
 that future generations will ask in vain for any 
 aid to their imagination of the introduction of 
 Dr. Kenealy to the Speaker, or any other recent 
 triumph of the British Constitution. 
 
 The verdict of existing British Art on existing 
 British Policy is, therefore, if I understand it 
 rightly, that we have none ; but, in the battle 
 of life, have arrived at declaration of an universal 
 Sauve qui peut ; or explicitly, to all men, Do as 
 you like, and get what you can. Something other 
 than this may however be gathered, it seems to 
 me, from the two records given us of the war, 
 so unwise, and yet so loyal, of sixty years 
 ago. 
 
 613. La Charge des Cuirassiers Frangais a 
 Waterloo. (Philippoteau.) 
 
 This carefully studied and most skilful battle 
 piece is but too likely to be overlooked in the 
 confused rush to Miss Thompson's more attrac- 
 tive composition. And of all in the Academy, 
 this is the picture which an Englishman, of right 
 feeling, would least wish to overlook. I remember
 
 55 
 
 no so impartial and faithful representation of an 
 historical battle. I know no war-painting by 
 the artists of any great race, however modest, 
 in which the object has not hitherto been 
 definitely self-laudation. But here is a piece 
 of true war-history, of which it is not possible 
 to say, by observance of any traceable bias, 
 whether a Frenchman or Englishman painted 
 it. Such a picture is more honourable to France 
 than the taking of the MalakorT. 
 
 I never approached a picture with more ini- 
 quitous prejudice against it, than I did Miss 
 Thompson's; partly because I have always said 
 that no woman could paint ; and secondly be- 
 cause I thought what the public made such a 
 fuss about, must be good for nothing. 
 
 But it is Amazon's work, this ; no doubt of it, 
 and the first fine pre-Kaphaelite * picture of battle 
 we have had ; profoundly interesting ; and show- 
 ing all manner of illustrative and realistic faculty. 
 Of course, all that need be said of it, on this 
 side, must have been said twenty times over in 
 the journals ; and it remains only for me to 
 make my tardy genuflexion, on the trampled 
 corn, before this Pallas of Pall Mall ; and to 
 murmur my poor words of warning to her, that 
 
 * Miss Thompson may perhaps not in the least know herself 
 for a sister of the school. But the entire power of her picture, 
 as of her own mind, depends first on her resolution to paint 
 things as they really are, or were ; and not as they might be 
 poetically fancied to be. See above, the note on 218, p. 10.
 
 56 
 
 she remember, in her day of triumph, how it 
 came to pass that Atalaiita was stayed, and 
 Camilla slain. 
 
 Camilla-like the work is chiefly in its refine- 
 ment, a quality I had not in the least expected, 
 for the cleverest women almost always show their 
 weakness in endeavours to be dashing. But 
 actually, here, what I suppose few people would 
 think of looking at, the sky, is the most tenderly 
 painted, and with the truest outlines of cloud, of 
 all in the exhibition; and the terrific piece of 
 gallant wrath and ruin on the extreme right, where 
 the cuirassier is catching round the neck of his 
 horse as he falls, and the convulsed fallen horse 
 just seen through the smoke below is wrought, 
 through all the truth of its frantic passion, with 
 gradations of colour and shade which I have not 
 seen the like of since Turner's death. 
 
 I place these two paintings under the head of 
 'Policy,' because it seems to me that, especially 
 before the Quatrebras, one might wisely consider 
 with Mr. Carlyle, and with oneself, what was 
 the ' net upshot ' and meaning of our modern 
 form of the industry of war. Why should these 
 wild and well meaning young Irish lads have 
 been brought, at great expense, all the way to 
 Four Arms, merely to knock equally wild and 
 well meaning young French lads out of their 
 saddles into their graves ; and take delight 
 in doing so ? and why should the English and 
 French squires at the head of their regiments, 
 have, practically, no other object in life than
 
 57 
 
 deceiving these poor boys, and an infinite mob 
 besides of such others, to their destruction ? 
 
 Think of it. Suppose this picture, as well as the 
 one I was so happy in praising of Mr. Collinsou's, 
 had been called as it, also, quite properly 
 might have been " Sunday Afternoon," (only 
 dating June 18th, 1815.") Suppose the two had 
 been hung side by side. And, to complete our 
 materials for meditation, suppose Mr. Nicol's 
 "The Sabbath Day" (1159) which I observed 
 the 'Daily Telegraph ' called an exquisitely comic 
 picture, but which I imagine Mr. Nicol meant 
 for a serious one, representing the conscientious 
 Scottish mountain-matron setting out for the place 
 where she may receive her cake of spiritual 
 oatmeal, baken on the coals of Presbyterian zeal ; 
 suppose, I say, this ideal of Scottish Sabbath 
 occupation placed beside M. Philippoteau's 
 admirable painting of the Highland regiment 
 at evening missionary service, in that sweet 
 and fruitful foreign land ; while Miss Thompson 
 enables us also, thus meditating in our fields at 
 eventide, to consider, if not the Lilies, at least 
 the Poppies of them ; and to understand how in 
 this manner of friction of ears of corn by his 
 bent knees instead of his fingers the modern 
 Christian shows that the Sabbath was made for 
 man, and not man for the Sabbath? 
 
 1 Well and if this were so done, should we 
 not feel that the peace of the cottage, and the 
 honour of the mountain- side, were guarded and 
 won for them by that mighty Evening Service,
 
 58 
 
 with the thunder of its funeral march rolled deep 
 among the purple clouds.? ' 
 
 No ! my soldier friends ; no : do not think it. 
 They were, and are, guarded and won by silent 
 virtues of the hearth and the rock, which must 
 endure until the time when the prayer we pray 
 in our every Sabbath Litany, to be delivered 
 from battle, murder, and sudden death, shall 
 have been offered with sincere hearts, fervently ; 
 and so found its way at last to the audience of 
 Heaven. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Printed by Watson and Hazell, London and Aylesbury.
 
 59 
 
 NOTE TO PICTURE 518. 
 
 " The rarity and grandeur of his character being that he 
 was a Greek in ideas and a Roman in action ; who really did, 
 and abstained, strictly to ideal, in a time when everybody else 
 was sadly fallen from his ideal. 
 
 "In 858 he is made Caesar (Constantius having no sons, and 
 he being last of his race) ; and from that to Constantius' death 
 in 361 he has to fight the Franks and Alemanni. During the 
 last few years of this time I find he lived mostly at Paris that 
 he fortified the ancient Lutetia (1'Ile de la Cite), built the Therma) 
 Juliani, the remains of which (Thermes de Julien) are still 
 visible in the Hue de la Harpe, between Palais de Clugny and 
 Ecole de Medecine. Also, in a scarcity of corn from inroads of 
 the Germans, he got a great supply of corn from England (calcu- 
 lated at 120,000 quarters at once] and fed people all along the 
 Rhine from Bingen to Cologne. He says (Epist. ii.) he was a 
 Christian up to his twentieth year, 351 : and he said nothing 
 about his change (in public) till 801. Then he felt himself the 
 successor of_M. Aurelius, and seems to have gone to work in his 
 determined, clear-sighted way. But the Pagans seem to have 
 been surprised at his faith as much as the Christians at his 
 apostacy." REV. R. ST. J. TYRWHITT.
 
 WORKS BY MR. RUSKIN, 
 
 Lately published or nearly ready. 
 
 NOW ISSUING. 
 
 REVISED SERIES OF ENTIRE WORKS, IN BOUND VOLUMES. 
 
 I. SESAME AND LILIES. iSs. 
 (Three Lectures, with New Preface.) 
 
 i. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 2. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 
 3. OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 II. MUNERA PULVERIS. i8s. 
 
 Six ESSAYS ON THE ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 
 
 HI. ARATRA PENTELICI. i 75. 6d. 
 
 Six LECTURES ON THE ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE, 
 
 Given before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term, 1870. 
 
 IV. THE EAGLE'S NEST. i8s. 
 
 TEN LECTURES ON THE RELATION OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO ART, 
 Given before the University of Oxford, in Lent Term, 1872. 
 
 V. TIME AND TIDE. i8s. 
 
 VI. THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. i8s. 
 
 FOUR ESSAYS ON WORK, TRAFFIC, WAR, AND THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 
 
 With added Article on the Economies of the Kings of Prussia. 
 
 VII. ARIADNE FLORENTINA. i 75- 6d. 
 Six LECTURES ON WOOD AND METAL ENGRAVING AND APPENDIX. 
 
 Given before the University of Oxford. 
 (On completion of the Seven Parts, see over leaf.} 
 
 VIII. VAL D'ARNO. i 75. 6d. 
 
 TEN LECTURES ON ART OF THE I3TH CENTURY IN PISA AND FLORENCE. 
 With Twelve Plates. 
 
 IX. QUEEN OF THE AIR. i8s.
 
 LOVE'S MEINIE. 
 
 LECTURES ON GREEK AND ENGLISH BIRDS. 
 
 Given before the University of Oxford, 
 i. THE ROBIN. Now Ready, is. post free, 
 ii. THE SWALLOW. ,, ,, ,, 
 
 in. THE CHOUGH. In preparation. 
 
 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 
 
 Six LECTURES ON WOOD AND METAL ENGRAVING, 
 Given before the University of Oxford. 
 
 i. DEFINITION OF THE ART OF ENGRAVING. Now Ready, is. post 
 
 free, 
 ii. THE RELATION OF ENGRAVING TO OTHER ARTS IN FLORENCE. 
 
 Now Ready, is. post free. 
 
 in. THE TECHNICS OF WOOD ENGRAVING. Now ready. 2s. 6d. post free, 
 iv. THE TECHNICS OF METAL ENGRAVING. Now ready. 2s. 6d. post free, 
 v. DESIGN IN THE GERMAN SCHOOLS OF ENGRAVING. (HOLBEIN AND 
 
 DURER.) Now Ready. 2s. 6d. post free, 
 vi. DESIGN IN THE FLORENTINE SCHOOLS OF ENGRAVING. (SANDRO 
 
 BOTTICELLI.) Now Ready. 2s. 6d. post free, 
 vil. APPENDIX. With Plates. In preparation. 2s. 6d. post free. 
 
 THE RELATION BETWEEN MICHAEL ANGELO AND 
 
 TINTORET. is. post free. 
 
 SEVENTH OF THE COURSE OF LECTURES ON SCULPTURE, 
 Delivered at Oxford, 1870-71. 
 
 MORNINGS IN FLORENCE. 
 
 i. SANTA CROCE. Now Ready. iod., post free. 
 
 ii. THE GOLDEN GATE. Now Ready, iod., post free, 
 in. BEFORE THE SOLD AN. Shortly, iod., post free, 
 iv. THE STRAIT GATE. Shortly, iod., post free. 
 
 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 READINGS IN MODERN PAINTERS. Now Ready. 35. 6d., post free. 
 
 PROSERPINA. 
 
 STUDIES OF WAYSIDE FLOWERS. 
 
 To be issued in Parts, with numerous Illustrations on Wood and Steel. 
 2s. 6d. each, post free. Part I. N(nv Ready, Part II. Shortly. 
 
 FORS CLAVIGERA. 
 
 LETTERS TO THE LABOURERS AND WORKMEN OF GREAT BRITAIN. 
 
 Nos. I to 36, 7d. each ; Nos. 37 to 54, iod., and to be continued monthly at 
 that price, post free. 
 
 To be had of GEORGE ALLEN, Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent. 
 
 POST OFFICE ORDERS payable at Chief Office, London. CHEQUES crossed 
 
 London and County Bank. 
 June, 1875.
 
 108774 i