"That is my secret. But have I not told you that Art is One?" "How mysterious! Come, I am waiting to see you make the hole."

"Well I found it in a song, into which you had put life, for once."

"Pazzie!-now then-the hole!" "Look-I will prove to you that I understood your song. Give it me."

"What? The knife or the scissors?"

"Neither-we will try the palette first. But don't go yet-I shall want you.'

July 8.-"Well, Antonia ?" "Not quite, yet. But it will do let me see in three days."

"In three days? I could not find myself another three days' work here. I should be overdoing things."

"You have nothing more to do." "What has to be done, then?" 'My friend, now you ought to call yourself stupid indeed. Cover it up, and look at it in three days."

"For the fairies to finish?"

"Yes-for the fairies. When a thing is good, the fairies always come and make it better. So cover it, and go and tell every one that you have painted a picture."

"But have I in truth done so ?"

66

My friend?"

Do you believe what the world says?"

"When I like. What does it say now? It says so many things.”

"It says that the English Herr, Edward Maurice, the pupil of Tibald the painter, has painted a great picture."

"Oh, my dear friend, I am glad indeed! Has Herr Tibald seen it ?" "Yes-and this is indeed something to be proud of-he agrees with the world."

"And you-what do you say yourself?"

"I say that the world is wrong, and Tibald too, for once." "Bravo! It is so likely you think so."

"I do, though. I say that the person who painted that picture is not the English Herr, Edward Maurice, the pupil of Tibald, but, through his hands, the Italian Fräulein, Antonia Salvi-the pupil of Raphael and of Titian. My dear Antonia, you cannot tell what I owe you.'

"Anch' io pittore!' I congratulate myself heartily, then.”

"Believe me, it is so. And now will you let me do something for you, in my turn ?”

"That depends on what it is."

"I have just received a very valuable commission. It is a government one, and I was recommended by Tibald. In fact, my good fortune is such that I wish my friends to share it. No, Antonia-I do not ask you to accept anything that you may not accept freely. Heaven alone knows how much of my good fortune-I speak seriously-I owe to your companionship. I now wish to carry out a very great wish of mine. I wish you to complete yourself as a singer, and myself to be the means by which you will achieve your fame."

THERE are few things more curious than the shape taken by extreme cultivation in these days in many well-known examples. It is the result of causes sufficiently natural, but yet at variance with the established principles of thought. Wisdom, according to the received idea, ought to be something above the common prejudices and prepossessions of man, above the dreams of youth-infinitely calm, exquisitely reasonable, taking into account not only all the essential elements of humanity, but also its outward conditions, the way by which it has come in the past, the limits which bind it in the present. Such are the qualities we expect from philosophers when they enter upon the consideration of social questions, and cast anxious eyes away from their books upon the sad and weary world in which they live. All of us, whether philosophers or not, are but too well aware that it is a weary and a melancholy world. Might is still right among us far more frequently than it ought to be. Folly gets uppermost notwithstanding all efforts to the contrary. Money swamps merit; falsehood gets the better of truth. Nor is the reckoning more reassuring when we leave considering the ways of man to man, and come to look at those which we broadly call Providence, the ways of God. God crushes as well as man; the hearts that are most sweet and full of divine charity are often the most hardly tried; the weary labourer to whom one touch of simple happiness, one word of kind encouragement, would give heart and strength for his work, has to toil on without either; no miracle drops down from heaven upon the suffering. Man sets his heel on the neck of his brother; and when the sufferer is at his earthly worst, heaven steps in with bereavements, disappointments,

pangs of the soul. Such is the common fashion of the world. When any thoughtful man approaches this subject, it is but natural that we should expect from him a breadth of apprehension, a sober calm of vision. If it were but a complicated machine which had to be set right this would be necessary; and the world is more complicated than any machine. A thousand things have to be taken. into consideration by him who would throw any light upon its problems. There are its laws to study; and when the laws have been studied, there are countless exceptions, modifying circumstances, individual peculiarities, to be taken into account. Neither will it do to look upon it arbitrarily as it is today. Our philosopher must consider how it came to be what it is to-day. He must realise the power of those dumb unreasonable forces that are always at work among human things; he must acknowledge the innate deficiencies of the line and plummet to measure the needs and capabilities of men. It would be endless work to make a catalogue of all the restrictions under which he would have to bind himself. Where is the man to be found so calm, so clear-sighted, so tolerant, so reasonable, as to take up this greatest of all subjects, and throw any real light to us as we toil in the dark upon the difficulties of our time?

It is curious, and it would be laughable, were it not so profoundly sad and beyond reach of mirth, to note the spirit and manner of thought in which the subject is really approached by many of our latter-day prophets. To those who argue upon strict law there is little to be said. The science of political economy may or may not be true, but it is at least a science dealing

with real or supposed laws, and bound to follow them out to what soever cruel consequences they may involve. We do not pretend to discuss any such system at the present moment. It is its avowed opponent who stands before us with the scroll in his hand, which is written within and without with other things besides lamentation and woe.* Mr Ruskin has taken up his position of prophet at his own hand. Nobody called him to that solemn and fatal eminence. The world received him with acclamation long ago into a high place in what seemed his natural sphere. He talked to us of art, and we listened, if not always agreeing, yet bound by the fascination of a voice full of the finest harmonies, the purest enthusiasms. He talked to us of clouds, and seas, and mountain lines, and those stones in which lie better things than sermons, and his audience hung entranced upon his lips. Nobody contested his excellency in his own walk. We might, indeed, hold his opinions less than sacred, and retain some certain right of private judgment of which our critic was as jealous as any Pope; but nevertheless England was proud of her critic, who was in himself as great an artist as the old Venetians or the modern painters of whom he spoke. are not informed what was the sudden inspiration or call of unknown voices which prompted him to leave this fair and peaceful eminence and rush up to the bleak hill-top where the prophets gather. He has himself avowed that their gift was not his. "By rights I ought to be out among the budding banks and hedges, outlining sprays of haw thorn and clusters of primroses; that is my right work," he says: and between this work and that of legislating for a nation there is little analogy or even resemblance. Society, we fear, can never be trained into those fine and tapering lines

We

which regulate the eaves of our trees, the petals of our flowers. There is nothing in it of kin with the innocent and spontaneous blossoms of the spring. The painter, the botanist, the observer of nature, require different faculties and another frame of mind from that demanded of a lawgiver; yet since Moses there have few more ambitious and catholic lawgivers risen among men than he who now addresses us from his blossomed orchard with the counsel of birds and the breath of flowers to help him in his selfappointed task.

But we are wrong in saying that we do not know by what inspiration Mr Ruskin has been thus forced from his natural occupation, and thrust up to that mount of vision on which the prophets dwell. He has himself told us the reason :

till

"It is not," he says, "in the inner gist and truth of it right nor good for you, or for anybody else, that Cruikshank, with his great gift, and I with my weak, but yet thoroughly clear and definite one, should both of us be tormented by agony of indignation and compassion, we are forced to give up our peace, and pleasure, and power; and rush down into the streets and lanes of the city to do the little that is in the strength of our single hands against their uncleanliness and iniquity. But as in a sorely besieged town every man went to the ramparts, whatsoever business he leaves, so neither he nor I have had any choice but to leave our household stuff and go on crusade such as we are called to; not that I mean, if Fate may be any way resisted, to give up the strength of my life, as he has given his; for I think he should only have carried the fiery cross was wrong in doing so; and that he his appointed leagues, and then given it into another hand and for my own part I mean these, my letters, to close my political work for many a day; and I write them not in any hope of their being at present listened to, but to disburthen my heart of the witness I have to bear, that I may be free to go back to my garden lawns and paint birds and flowers there."

Let us allow, without any further question, that this is a just and feasible reason why any man, whatever his private avocation, should interpose in the ill-regulated affairs of the world. He has a burden on his heart because of their misery, their hardships, all the wrongs and pangs they involve, and he must utter his burden or die. It has been such an impulse which has moved the greatest of prophets; once possessed by this fire in his veins, the man's opinion is worth pondering, though his trade had been to work flowers in Berlin wool, instead of to paint them; and for this cause, if no other, we are ready to give our best attention to Mr Ruskin. He has a fancy for foolish titles, which give a fantastic character, or at least the appearance of a fantastic character, to his books; but, after all, that is a trifling and superficial weakness. It is not to be denied that he is eloquent, that he is in earnest, and that he thinks there is something in what he has to say. What does it matter though a book be called 'Sesame and Lilies,' if there is really something in it worthy, at this crisis of human affairs, of the attention of men? 'Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne' may suggest sketches of rude Northumbrian life instead of the polished musings of a philosopher in his garden; but that is a matter of the most trifling noimportance, if it be the fact that it conveys valuable information to us upon the problems of the day. We grant all these preliminaries without grudging to our new prophet. All we ask of him is that he shall really have this burden of prophecy, and that however fantastically in his own way, not in ours, he shall utter what wisdom is in him, and cast such light as he possesses upon the workaday puzzles of the world.

And in case our readers should not recollect what kind of globe this is, let us set before them the sphere and material upon which

Mr Ruskin means to operate. The system he propounds is not a modification or improvement of existing things, but an entire new code of laws. He proposes to make us new from top to toe. Therefore it is fit that we should realise, to start with, who and what we are. We are, in the first place, a nation which has long held itself up before Christendom as a model of freedom and constitutional perfection. We have struggled for hundreds of years against everybody who attempted to restrain our individual liberties. We have thought nothing of sacrificing a dynasty to secure to ourselves the right of being consulted either in pretence or reality about everything that was done for us. Age after age our struggle has been to extend further and further the bounds of personal freedom. Inquisition of every kind is utterly obnoxious to us. An Englishman is born with the proud privilege of going where he pleases, doing as he pleases, and, so long as he keeps the law and his reputation, being asked no questions. Even what he says, except in the most extreme cases, is his own affair, and one with which no official interferes. A Frenchman must be furnished with ses papiers, words which mean volumes to every Continental ear. A German, if he happens to be "wanted," has always a neat succinct little biography to go with him, compiled by a watchful State. But an Englishman's boast is that there is no biography of him anywhere-that nobody cares whence he comes, nor whither he goesthat he may make what alliances he pleases, work when he pleases, idle when he pleases, subject himself to private tyranny if he likes, but resist all public espionage to the death. Our history is full of this leading principle. Generation after generation has thrown off another and another coil of social restriction-not convulsively, nor all at once, but with a patient determination, which shows how it has

entered into the heart of the nation. All this is as well known as their A B C to most men. And it is to a nation of this kind that Mr Ruskin, a well-educated Englishman, propounds his new code of laws. He is a Tory and Conservative, he says he has no such horror of slavery, and no such unbounded faith in freedom, as have Englishmen in general. But still, we suppose, he is sane and in his right mind, and understands something of the analogy of facts. He would not propose to a community of Puritans an instantaneous plunge into all the dissipations of fashionable society; nor would he propose a course of severe philosophical study to the members of, say, the Pytchley or any other hunt. But what he proposes to do is stranger and foolisher than either-so strange indeed and so foolish that the public in the extreme absurdity of it is apt to lose a useful lesson, and greet with scornful laughter alone a sight which is well calculated to arouse more painful emotions.

For human folly, especially when in conjunction with human wisdom, is an affecting sight to behold; and there is something amazing in the calm with which a man, who is immensely above the average in intellect, and still more so in cultivation, can look down from his eminence on hearts breaking and lives perishing, and utter forth his childish panacea. In such circumstances the destructive has a great advantage over the constructive philosopher. The former cannot but have a great deal of reason in his denunciations, and so long as he confines himself to these he is safe. No prophet can raise his voice too loudly against modern, as none has been too energetic against ancient, crimes and miseries. Our world is full of sordid sins, of shameless follies, of mean and shortsighted perversity. Whole classes among us bellow for freedom one moment, and bind themselves under a voluntary system of slavery the next.

Others make loud proclamations of uprightness, and while they are doing it, exert their whole strength to defraud their neighbours. Since the world began, its history has been that of a series of crises, more or less violent, in which everything that was bad surged to the top with a force which threatened to swamp everything that was good and noble.. The motive of the crisis changes from time to time, but the fact does not vary. And we are now in the midst of one of those violent emergencies. The special sin of the time is lawlessness or lawless selfishness-the reign of every man's special interest, or of whatever every man thinks his special interest,in antagonism to that of the species in general, and of all and every other man. Ours is a day in which every man does his work for his pay, and for no other motive; in which excellence has ceased to be desired or thought desirable, and fame, that last infirmity of noble minds, has gone out of fashion-a day in which we no longer care what becomes of our neighbours, but centre all our thoughts on ourselves. Ours is the age of tradesunions-societies which (whatever advantage may be in them, a question which it is not our business to discuss) hold their members down to a level of compulsory mediocrity, and wield over their enemies the mysterious power of a Vehme Gericht; of competitions in which a man's ability to govern a province is proved by his capacity for remembering a date; a day of fraudulent bankruptcies, of mercantile dishonesty, of rampant tradesmanship. It would be difficult to overestimate the real evils of the time. And there are plenty of voicesnot sweet, perhaps, but serious enough-to proclaim it; voices, no doubt, that sometimes shriek fanatically, and sometimes overstep the boundary between the ridiculous and the sublime. There is Carlyle, with thunders of Jove, with wild lightning and storm-blasts, blazing