Disguise it as we will, is not pleasure, happiness, the universal motive, the final end of all action? Allege, then, as an inducement to virtue, the pleasure which satisfied sympathy with our fellow men will cause us to feel when labouring to secure their welfare and hastening the perfection of the race by the sacrifice of our own selfish gratifications. Will not the average man reply-like the murderess in M. Octave Feuillet's novel La Morte, to her positivist and philanthropic uncle-"Really, these pleasures don't attract me. I assure you, I have not the smallest wish to subject myself to privations, restraints, and sacrifices, in order that I may prepare for the benefit of future humanity a state of happiness and perfection which I am not to share, a paradise into which I may not enter."

The Service of Man aims at objects too abstract and remote for the desire of securing them, unsupported by other motives, to prevail in moments of temptation over selfish impulse and passion.

Mr. Morrison seems to expect a closer logical connection than is usually found between men's beliefs and their actions; he overrates the power of the reason, and does not make sufficient allowance for the sophistry of passion. Hence, for instance, he thinks it necessary to find in the doctrine they profess a logical justification for the immorality of Christian believers. Surely men are far less rational than he supposes, they are even capable of being simultaneously influenced by motives which logically would seem to exclude each other; is it not, then, foolish to deprive them of any motive to right action, because it may not seem altogether consistent with another, which, to us, appears more valuable? May not we insist upon the one without attacking the other? But this is a question hardly to be discussed in a few lines.

As for the influence of the Religion of the Future on the bad, the question appears to Mr. Morrison to be hardly worth considering. There is no cure for a bad heart, and he would altogether banish these incurables from the world, or, at the very least prevent them from continuing their worthless and mischievous kind. With all our hearts. But how is this amputation of the diseased parts of the social body to be effected?

Mr. Morrison does not say. He has unfortunately been prevented from indicating, even in outline, how he would organize his Republic; how a despotism is to be established and maintained, wise and powerful enough to exercise over the breeding and education of its citizens a control which would leave as little free play to individual choice and inclination as was to be permitted in the Platonic State.

.*

In his Preface he appears to look forward with gloomy forebodings to a tremendous industrial and economical catastrophe, which he believes to be impending ;* although he generally, in common with other evolutionists, proclaims his faith in progressive improvement. As if the survival of the fittest implied the survival of the best, an unreasonable assumption, seeing that the conditions of the struggle may be such as to favour the lower and less perfect organism. Of what profit are eyes to a fish that lives in the dark, or bright colours to a flower that does not feel the want of insect society?

The object of the writer of these remarks has not been to touch upon those points which would be most likely to attract the attention of a Christian apologist, but rather to justify his opinion that there is little in this book tending to the edification and comfort of a sceptic, who looks back with regret to a religion which he can no longer hold, and with misgivings to a future in which he can see no promise of any creed capable of supplying the place of that which he has lost. Mr. Morrison, indeed, calls his work An Essay towards the Religion of the Future, but he does not tell us whether by this he means what the religion of the future will be, or what it ought to be? Probably he would reply, the question is immaterial. The path is traced for us; we have only to determine whether we will follow with good or bad grace, with lame and impious reluctance, or with cheerful alacrity ; though our struggle may delay and embitter the journey, sooner or later we must reach the goal. But what comfort is there in this, if we had not rather not get there?

* Mr. Cotter Morrison is generally so well informed that if, as we hope, he hereafter sketches the future social and economic evolutions, he will probably have found time to pursue his studies of political economy a little farther. In which case he will doubtless abandon the often exposed fallacy of a "glut of commodities," i.e. of the production of much wealth being in itself an evil, irrespective of the question of distribution. In the meantime, we will answer the question he propounds. Why have not ivory, whalebone, and oysters become cheaper, if the general fall in prices is due to the appreciation of gold? Of course, because there are fewer whales, elephants, and oysters, while the number of people having an effectual demand for ivory, whalebone, and oysters has increased. If gold had not been appreciated, the price of these articles would have risen proportionately higher, ceteris paribus, owing to the diminished supply; oysters, e.g., might have risen 75 per cent., but supposing gold has also risen 25 per cent., then, expressed in gold, the value of oysters has risen 75-25 per cent., i.e. 50 per cent. The appreciation of gold-supposing there to have been such appreciation— has prevented the price of articles whose value relatively to other commodities has increased, from rising, or from rising so much; while it has exaggerated the fall in price of articles whose relative value would in any case, owing to a less cost of produc tion or stimulated competition, have diminished. But this is rudimentary, and it is really astonishing that such a question should apparently have perplexed an acute and practised thinker.

P. F. WILLERT.

DONATELLO, AND

THE

UNVEILING OF THE

FAÇADE OF THE DUOMO AT FLORENCE.

A SKETCH.

Yet there are lives that, 'mid the trampling throng,
With their prime beauty bloom at evensong;

Souls that with no confusing flutter rise,

Spread the wings once, and sail in Paradise;

Hearts for whom God has judged it best to know,

Only by hearsay, sin, and waste, and woe;

Bright to come hither, and to travel hence

Bright as they came, and wise in innocence.

The Renewal of Youth, and Other Poems. By F. Myers.

SUCH a life was that of Donatello, and it is an occasion like the unveiling of the Façade of the Duomo at Florence, which arrests the "trampling throng" of the nineteenth century midway in the tread-mill of life, and suggests thoughts other than those practical considerations which will encroach in undue proportion upon the economy of human existence; just as the Duomo itself, rising in silent majesty out of the heart of a city alive with a thousand past memories, astir with ever-present life, forces an involutary homage from all who come for the first time within its precincts.

It would not, perhaps, be very easy to analyse the cause of the emotion. The student of literature, having learnt from a great master a lesson in the sublime, might trace it to an overwhelming sense of the power and strength necessary to conceive and fulfil a design of so much grandeur and such vast dimensions; the student of art might ascribe the sense of awe to a perception of a grand whole, produced by excellence in every part. But there is yet something more: something which has the power to touch those who are neither lovers of literature nor students of art, and which, without appealing to the understanding, can awaken a responsive chord in the heart of the most ignorant contadino when he looks up with fond pride at the "Santa Maria del Fiore," that great landmark in the horizon from his home, nestled in some nook of the surrounding hills. He cannot explain it, but it has very recently been explained for him, within the walls of the great Cathedral, if he made one of the seven thousand who, during the

past Lent, have hung upon the words of Padre Agostino da Montefeltro. From the lips of that saintly preacher he will have learnt that the explanation lies in that one word Religion, which he has been exhorted to inscribe on his labourer's banner as the climax of Labour and Union; and that it is that same word which had power, in the far centuries back, to say to those stately walls, where yet linger the echoes of the eloquent voice: "Ye shall be built." Nor had that impression time to fade from his mind before it was renewed by another influence, to which, since the time of Giotto, no Florentine has been insensible-the influence of art. The words of the preacher had fallen upon the ear: the lesson for the eye was no less striking, when, a few weeks subsequently, the veil fell from the Façade of the Duomo and revealed it in all its majestic beauty, completed after a lapse of five centuries, a firstfruit of free Italy, a harbinger of the much-desired harmony between Church and State which will one day complete the perfection of the United Kingdom.

Among the representative characters chosen out of Florentine History as worthy to find a place in the glorious façade, because of their various witness to the truth of Christianity, the most prominent position is assigned to Donatello, and justly, for he was eminently the sculptor of Christianity. It was in Christian art that he attained his celebrity, and even if he had not contributed some of his finest work to the adornment of the Duomo itself, there would, on that ground alone, have been a very marked fitness in a commemoration which combined the celebration of his fifth centenary with the unveiling of the Façade.

There is no positive record of the date of Donatello's birth, though it is indicated by himself in his returns for the tax-collectors, but the year 1386 is now generally accepted to be the correct date. He was the son of Niccolò di Betto Bardi, a wool-comber in Florence, and, as such, a member of "L'Arte della Lana," one of the seven major arts of Florence. But, whereas his father had taken an active and vehement share in the Florentine factions, Donatello held aloof from them, preferring to remain in the untroubled atmosphere of art, where, with nothing to distract his mind from the continued study of her sublime lessons, he was able to reach an eminence hitherto unattained by predecessor or contemporary.

History affords but scant details of his early years, except that he was brought up from childhood in the Casa Martelli, where he made himself beloved by his amiable qualities, his docility, industry, and love of study. The rudiments of art he is supposed to have learnt from Lorenzo di Bicci, one of the most celebrated among the painters and artists of the fourteenth century.

In the earliest edition of his well-known work, Vasari indulged in a preamble to the life of Donatello, afterwards eliminated by the author himself, either because too high-flown in style, or because he thought it militated against the opinions he had previously expressed of those sculptors who had preceded Donatello in art. This preamble, however, reappears in the last edition of Vasari, and forms so lively an introduction to the subject, that it is to be regretted that it cannot be re-inserted in the text, instead of being relegated to a note.

The sculptors [Vasari writes] whom we have hitherto described, belonged to the ancient, though by no means the antique, school of art; dismayed by the many difficulties of art, they never could produce anything but round, shapeless, blunt forms, alike in bronze or marble. Their own intellects being blunt and stupid, they must needs produce their resemblance in the forms they modelled. Thus their works were devoid of vigour or animation, it being utterly impossible to give a property not inherent in the donor. This being the case, Nature, justly indignant at seeing herself so grossly caricatured, determined to send into the world a sculptor who could infuse grace and proportion into her luckless marbles and hardly-used bronze treasures, which, as a provident mother, were dear to her as the offspring of long diligence and care.

From this quaint description of the early efforts of the medieval sculptors, it is evident that, by the side of Donatello, they can only be looked upon in the light of stone-carvers, and that when their work is compared with his it falls far short of any claim to hold a place in the divine art of sculpture.

Donatello turned from the conventional forms they had been content to reproduce the stiff emaciated angels of the fifteenth century, with their impassive expression of countenance, no matter whether the emotion intended to be represented was one of joy or sorrow-and, studying directly from nature, he made his cherubs robust and smiling, like the children he took for his models. Thus he contrived to imbue his works with a life and movement hitherto unknown to sculpture, and to create an era in that special branch of art, at the same time that Ghiberti was modelling the gates fit to be the Gates of Paradise, and Brunellesco planning the Cupola of the Duomo. Both these artists were impressed with the promising talent of the young sculptor. Ghiberti employed his "prentice hand" in modelling the famous gates, and Brunellescogave him a lesson in refinement of execution, which has come down to posterity in the famous anecdote of the Crocifisso delle Uova. Donatello had been for a long time at work upon a crucifix (it is still to be seen in the Cappella de' Bardi in Santa Croce); he had bestowed upon it the utmost care and pains in the wish to bring it as near perfection as possible, and it can easily be imagined how great was his disappointment when, on shewing it to Brunellesco, he was told that the proportions of the figure upon

* Vasari, Opere, vol. ii., Ed. Milanesi, p. 395, note.