Page images
PDF
EPUB

E'en with a word: I could not, though your wife.
I struggled hard to win your love; but no!
I could not win it; yet I loved you so.

The hope that lighted up my path so long
Has flickered and died out. I could not live
Without your love; but you did me no wrong-
I could not gain what you had not to give.
Nay, weep not! I am happy now I see
You'll love my mem'ry better far than me.

The strife has been so long, the way so drear,
I feared my patience and my trust in God
Would fail; but now I see the end so near,
"Tis easier far to bow beneath the rod.
The night is nearly o'er; the morn is nigh:
Thank God for taking me! Dear love, good-bye!
-Temple Bar.

BRIEF LITERARY NOTICES. History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, called Frederick the Great. By Thomas Carlyle. Vols. V. and VI. London: Chapman and Hall. 1865. The concluding volumes of Mr. Carlyle's Frederick the Great have appeared, and a premature death can not now intervene to add one more melancholy example to the long list of great historical works left half-finished. Now that we can look on the work as a whole, we can see how large a scope it permitted to Mr. Carlyle's peculiar powers, how apt a subject it afforded for the application of his peculiar theories, but also how far it has failed to let Mr. Carlyle do justice to himself. Mr. Carlyle has a knowledge of Europe in the eighteenth century which is wholly unrivaled, and the history of Frederick involves the history of Germany, France, and England, and of a large portion of French and German literature. Mr. Carlyle has a marvelous power of condensing the result of his researches and reflections into pregnant, epigrammatic, half-ludicrous sentences or expressions; and the various persons who floated to the top of European society in the middle of the last century were exactly suited to be described in this way, having a certain limited interest for the modern world, and being neither too wise nor too good to be dashed off with a humorous epithet or two. Further, Mr. Carlyle has a passion for accuracy of detail. He loves to take the utmost pains to make his geography and his chronology right. He is not satisfied with knowing that Frederick and his army crossed a brook; he wants also to know whether this brook had a gravelly or a muddy bottom. He is not satisfied with knowing that the brook was crossed on such a day of such a month, but he wants also to know what was the hour and the minute. Frederick's history of fers an ample field for this sort of labor, for Frederick was continually, for near thirty years, crossing brooks, and the glory and delight of finding out these brooks is much increased by the dismal character of the country where they are to be discovered. A man who sets himself to describe very accurately and minutely the bogs of Bohemia may have the satisfaction of thinking that, if he can carry his readers successfully through this amount of topography, he can carry them through anything. Frederick, too, presents many of the qualities which Mr. Carlyle has spent his life in

trying to make the world admire. He was very hard-working, very despotic, with a stern purpose to which he succeeded in making other men bend, and full of a bull-dog courage. Undoubtedly he was a captain of men and a captain of industry, and made many millions of men fight, or dig, or die, as he pleased. But the life of Frederick totally fails to give Mr. Carlyle scope for his power of seizing that which is pious, noble, and good in the characters of pious, noble, and good men. He feels this, and shows that he feels it. He is obliged to be constantly patronizing Frederick, making the best of him, exclaiming and protesting that, although he was a heathenish old brute, he still fought and wrought so well that anything may be forgiven him. It may, therefore, seem as if the choice of Frederick were to be regretted, and that Mr. Carlyle might have devoted to a better purpose the maturest years of his intellectual power. We do not think so. This history of Frederick the Great appears to us quite a good enough work for the theory of captains of men and industry to have resulted in. It is better that the theory should be shown us once for all in its naked simplicity, and that we should not see it confused and overshadowed by the accidental virtues of a mixed character like Cromwell. Frederick affords a very fair instance of the kind of man Mr. Carlyle wishes to uphold. He was neither too bad nor too good. He worked towards ends that can not be called mean or purely selfish, and he showed unconquerable tenacity in his manner of working. To keep up the Prussian army, to crib bits of his neighbors' territory, and to improve Prussian trade and agriculture, were the sort of things which an able and resolute King of Prussia in the last century naturally felt himself called upon to do. Frederick did these things, and Mr. Carlyle praises him. highly for doing them. According to Mr. Carlyle's view, he showed himself in this to be a man who saw facts, and the eternal purposes of Heaven, and who consulted the veracities. Frederick saw the fact that a very highly disciplined army like the Prussian, if well led, might give its owner a power disproportionate to the numerical strength of his force. He saw the fact that Silesia might be safely occupied, and Poland advantageously dismembered. He saw the fact that large tracts of land migh be drained, by the active intervention of Government, which could never be drained or turned to any account by the poverty-stricken creatures who inhabited them. But then to see facts like these, though the foundation of much excellence, is not enough to make a man a hero. It is not so much his aim, as the mode in which he carried out his aims, that gives Frederick so high a place in Mr. Carlyle's estimation. He was wholly inattentive to the doggeries, and this is what makes him so dear to his biographer. That is, he did not mind what was said or thought of him, or what misery he caused, so long as he had his own beneficent way. To do things moderately good, with a perfect indifference to the feelings of every one, is the ideal of human life which Mr. Carlyle, amid some wayerings, has set himself to preach up for the last thirty years; and Frederick the Great approaches this ideal sufficiently to warrant Mr. Carlyle in choosing him as a representative man.

But Mr. Carlyle is a very honest man, and he never consciously carries his theory further than he

in any of the portraits he has given, or of the countries and societies he has depicted. Poland is a subject after Mr. Carlyle's own heart. It must be owned that Poland in those days was, and for some time had been, anarchical; and "anarchies are not permitted in this world." More es

thinks it warranted; and if an objection to it crosses his mind, he lets his readers know his thoughts. On one occasion the startling question seems to have occurred to him-"But what if there were no doggeries, or if they left off yelping altogether, and the captains did exactly as they pleased, without any one approving or disapprov-pecially there was the Liberum Veto, "the powing them; would that be altogether so desirable a state of things?" If a sovereign, or other strong person, announcing himself as a seer of facts and an accomplisher of the decrees of Providence, were to march armies about, and dismember kingdoms, and in various ways trample on his neighbors, and no one objected, or resisted, or praised, or blamed him; would not this last state of things be worse than the first? Is it for example, altogether to be regretted that Europe shrieked a little over the partition of Poland? Mr. Carlyle is obliged to own that humanity, after all, requires its doggeries, or, in other words, that tyranny and robbery ought to receive the disapprobation of men. This opinion, wrung out of him, as it were, by his own troublesome conscience, is expressed as follows:

"For, granting that the Nation of Poland was for centuries past an Anarchy doomed by the Eternal Laws of Heaven to die, and then of course to get gradually buried, or eaten by neighbors, were it only for sanitary reasons-it will by no means suit to declare openly on behalf of terrestrial neighbors who have taken up such an idea (granting it were even a just one, and a true reading of the silent but inexorably certain purposes of Heaven), that they, those volunteer terrestrial neighbors, are justified in breaking in upon the poor dying or dead carcass, and flaying and burying it, with amicable sharing of skin and shoes! If it even were certain that the wretched Polish Nation, for the last forty years hastening with especial speed towards death, did in present circumstances, with such a howling canaille of Turk Janissaries and vultures of creation busy round it, actually require prompt surgery, in the usual method, by neighbors-the neighbors shall and must do that function at their own risk. If Heaven did appoint them to it, Heaven, for certain, will at last justify them; and in the meanwhile, for a generation or two, the same Heaven (I can believe) has appointed that Earth shall pretty unanimously condemn them. The shrieks, the foam-lipped curses of mistaken mankind, in such case, are mankind's one security against over-promptitude (which is so dreadfully possible) on the part of surgical neighbors."

It is true that at the end of this passage Mr. Carlyle relapses into assuring his "articulatespeaking friends" that the solution of the riddle is not logic, but silence. He can not quite bear to let the doggeries fancy he is a convert to them; and perhaps the doggeries may be content with the amount of adhesion to them they have got. And certainly the doggeries of this generation need not yelp very loudly about the part which Frederick took in the partition. It was not his idea, but that of the Czarina; and he merely managed the matter so that the partitioning Powers should not quarrel over the spoil. Nowhere in the whole of this long work has Mr. Carlyle been more happy than in his description of the Czarina and of Poland, and nowhere more graphic

er of one man to stop the proceedings of the Polish Parliament, by pronouncing audibly 'Nie Pozwalam,' I don't permit. Never before or since, among mortals, was so incredible a law." But there the law, however increditable, was "like an ever-flowing fountain of anarchy, joyful to the Polish nation." But the Poles had something else in the anarchical way quite as peculiar as the Liberum Veto. They had the right of confederation, "the brightest jewel in the cestus of Polish liberty-right of every Polish gentleman to confederate with every other against, or for, whatsoever to them two may seem good." No wonder Poland, with such fountains of anarchy in it, was what Mr. Carlyle calls the door-mat of Russiathe country across which she stepped, and on which she wiped her feet as she pleased when she wished to visit Europe. But the Czarina did not mean to hurt Poland very much. She only did not know what to do with it, and first gave it as a kingdom to one of her ex-lovers, and then stripped off some of its superfluities. Of the Czarina Mr. Carlyle speaks in kindly terms, as "a grandiose creature, with considerable magnanimities, natural and acquired, with many ostentations, some really great qualities and talents; in effect a kind of Louis-Quatorze, if the reader will reflect on that royal gentleman, and put him into petticoats in Russia, and change his improper females for improper males." And this good creature, as Mr. Carlyle believes, really wished to treat Poland in a philanthropic and handsome way which would do her credit in Europe, and to "gain glory both with the enlightened philanthropic classes and with her own proud heart by her treatment of that intricate matter." Thus rosewater is thrown over even the partition of Poland, and thus even Czarinas are rehabilitated. Not perhaps unjustly, for Nie Pozwalam is, it must be confessed, rather too anarchical for the stoutest friend of liberty; and we have no means of disputing the hypothesis that Catharine, in seizing on the most available part of Poland, really wished, not only to aggrandize herself, but to please Voltaire and her own improper male.

Mr. Carlyle is, as usual, admirable in the delineation of his characters of the second class; not only of the eminences whom, like Catharine, he hits off in a sentence or two, but of those whom he describes at some length-literary eminences, for the most part, known by name to most persons who have read anything about Continental literature in the eighteenth century, but only by name or by a dim notion of their words. Mr. Carlyle fills in their vague outlines, and lets us know what the men were really like. For example, he gives the following inimitable sketch of Gellert, and we will pay our readers the compliment of supposing they know Gellert by name :

"A modest, despondent kind of man, given to indigestions, dietetics, hypochondria: of neat figure and dress; nose hooked, but not too much; eyes mournfully blue and beautiful, fine open

brow-a fine countenance, and fine soul of its sort, poor Gellert: 'punctual like the churchclock at divine service, in all weathers.'

"A man of some real intellect and melody; some, by no means much; who was of amiable meek demeanor; studious to offend nobody, and to do whatever good he could by the established methods; and who, what was the great secret of his success, was orthodoxy of perfect and eminent. Whom, accordingly, the whole world, polite Saxon orthodox world, hailed as its Evangelist and Trismegistus. Essentially a commonplace man; but who employed himself in beautifying and illuminating the commonplace of his day and generation:-infinitely to the satisfaction of said generation. 'How charming that you should make thinkable to us, make vocal, musical, and comfortably certain, what we were all inclined to think; you creature plainly divine!' And the homages to Gellert were unlimited and continual, not pleasant all of them to an idlish man in weak health."

And there are many touches equally good. For instance, there was a certain Büsching, who dined with the Queen of Sweden, of whom we read: "Büsching dined with Her Majesty several times-eating nothing,' he is careful to mention, and was careful to show Her Majesty, 'except, very gradually, a small bit of bread soaked in a glass of wine!'-meaning thereby, Note, ye great great ones, it is not for your dainties; in fact, it is out of loyal politeness mainly!' the gloomily humble man.

[ocr errors]

Here is a whole portrait of a man in two or three lines. Whether, as a matter of fact, Büsch.. ing in the flesh was like this, no one can say; but at any rate this is a first-rate picture of a possible Büsching-of a man gloomily humble-a character and a scene condensed into two words. In a more comic but equally vivid vein is the following account of a remedy to which the great Zimmermann, author of Solitude, heroically sub

first gentleman that falls into it (a mass of Hanover stolidity, stupidity, foreign to you, heedless of you be King: Supreme Majesty he, with hypothetical decorations, dignities, solemn appliances, high as the stars (the whole, except the money, a mendacity, and sin against Heaven; of your England; and having done so―tie him him you declare Sent-of-God, Supreme Captain up (according to Pitt) with Constitutional straps, cidents; in which state he is fully cooked; throw me at his Majesty's feet, and let me bless Heaven for such a Pillar of Cloud by day."

so that he can not stir hand or foot, for fear of ac

Passages like these irradiate the volumes, and cheer up admiring readers after the dreary struggle of the Seven Years' War. In spite of all the pains Mr. Carlyle has taken to make it lively, the history of the struggle remains as dreary as ever. It is nothing but a long mournful series of marches across brooks at 2 P. M. and into bogs at 5 P. M. The brook and the bog are minutely described to us, and the hour precisely noted; but we can neither realize, nor persuade ourselves to care about, the contest. Sometimes Frederick wins, and sometimes he loses; but we know beforehand that all the parties to it ended as they began, and therefore the ups and downs do not affect us much. Unquestionably we learn to admire Frederick for fighting a losing game with such astonishing pertinacity. But the exact steps he took are duller and drearier to read of than most military events; and it' makes the account of the Seven Years' War less interesting that, when it is over, we begin to read of Frederick only, and of his sayings and doings in daily life, so that we then get much more of the main subject-that is, Frederick himself-than when we are trying to keep up with the marches and counter-marches of his army. Among the small events of Frederick's latter days was the appeal to his justice in the case of the miller Arnold-a man who had lost the water from his mill, but who, as every successive Court, even to the very highest, repeatedly held, lost it because the man who took it had a legal right to take it. "The famed Meckel received his famed patient Here was a poor man who lived by his mill, and a Frederick would listen to no legal arguments. with a nobleness worthy of the heroic ages. Lodg-rich man took the poor man's mill-water away. ed him into his own house, in softest beds and ap- It was a case for a King to interfere, and Fredpliances; spoke comfort to him, hope to himerick did interfere to Mr. Carlyle's great delight. the gallant Meckel; rallied, in fact, the due med- The King was, as his biographer says, ical staff one morning; came up to Zimmermann, "very imwho 'stripped,' with the heart of a lamb and lion patient indeed when he came upon imbecility and conjoined, and trusting in God, 'flung himself on pedantry threatening to extinguish essence and his bed (on his face, or on his back, we never fact among his law people." These wicked law know), and there, by the hands of Meckel and people, in an imbecile and pedantic way, insisted staff, 'received above 2,000 (two thousand cuts, the country, was the position of the parties, what on seeing what, under the acknowledged law of in the space of an hour and a half, without uttering evidence was adduced, what damage done. one word or sound.' A frightful operation, gallantly endured, and skillfully done; whereby the the captain of men acted in a far better way. His 'bodily disorder' (Leibesschade), whatever it unerring sagacity taught him that what a poor might be, was effectually and forever set about its claims must be just; and for not seeing this, but for man says must be true, and that what a poor man business by the noble Meckel." honestly abiding by their own views of law, he sent the judges themselves to prison-thus showing, as Mr. Carlyle says, that he had very little sympathy for mere respectability of wig. In modern England, we may say without regret, the doggerics are too strong and loud to let such noble principles of the unpedantic take root; and, greatly to their credit, the Berlin doggeries yelped bravely enough. But the captain had his own way, and

mitted:

And not less effective in its way, though with a comedy that is, we will hope, misplaced, is this account of the famous British Constitution in its palmy Hanoverian days:

"Stranger theory of society, completely believed in by a clear, sharp and altogether human head, incapable of falsity, was seldom heard of in the world. For King: open your mouth, let the

But

"continued his salutary cashierment of the wigged gentlemen and imprisonment till their full term ran. And in this way, and in this mood, he set about everything, always assiduous, inexorable, doing everything possible, and doing everything possible himself. "The strictest husbandman is not busier with his farm than Friederich with his kingdom throughout; which is indeed a farm leased him by the Heavens, in which not a gatebar can be broken, nor a stone or sod roll into the ditch, but it is to his, the husbandman's, damage, and must be instantly looked after." This was his notion of duty, and it was because he did his duty after his fashion so earnestly and thoroughly that Mr. Carlyle has set him up on a literary pedestal, grieved a little that he was not a greater and completer hero, but finding such comfort and assurance as are expressed in the following striking words at the end of the book:

"He well knew himself to be dying; but, some think, expected that the end might be a little farther off. There is a grand simplicity of stoicism in him; coming as if by nature, or by long second-nature; finely unconscious of itself, and finding nothing of peculiar in this new trial laid on it. From of old, Life has been infinitely contemptible to him. In death, I think, he has neither fear nor hope. Atheism, truly, he never could abide; to him, as to all of us, it was flatly inconceivable that intellect, moral emotion, could have been put into him by an Entity that had. none of its own. But there, pretty much, his Theism seems to have stopped. Instinctively, too, he believed, no man more firmly, that Right alone has ultimately any strength in this world; ultimately, yes;--but for him and his poor brief interests, what good was it? Hope for himself in Divine Justice, in Divine Providence, I think he had not practically any; that the unfathomable Demiurgus should concern himself with such a set of paltry ill-given animalcules as oneself and mankind are, this also, as we have often noticed, is in the main incredible to him.

"A sad Creed, this of the King's; he had to co his duty without fee or reward. Yes, reader; -and what is well worth your attention, you will have difficulty to find, in the annals of any Creed, a King or a man who stood more faithful to his duty; and, till the last hour, alone concerned himself with doing that. To poor Freiderich that was all the Law and all the Prophets; and I much recommend you to surpass him, if you, by good luck, have a better Copy of those inestimable Documents!"

SCIENCE.

Professor Agassiz has laid before the Paris Academy a remarkable paper upon the "Metamorphoses of Fishes," which he states are, according to his observations, as important as those of Reptiles (Amphibia.) At the present time, when pisciculture is so much studied, it appears remarkable that such metamorphoses should not have been sooner observed, but Agassiz accounts for it by the fact, that the metamorphoses generally commence immediately after hatching, at which period the fishes die rapidly when kept in captivity. He says he is prepared to show that

[ocr errors]

4

certain small fishes, which at first resemble Gadoids, or Blennioids, gradually pass to the type of Labroids and Lophioids; and that certain embryos, similar to the tadpoles of the frog or the toad, take by degrees the form of Cyprinodonts-that certain Apodes are transformed into Abdominal fishes, while some Malacopterygians (soft-finned) are changed into Acanthopterygians (hard-finned ;) and, further, that a natural classification of Fishes can be founded on the correspondence which exists between their embryonic development and the complication of their structure in the adult state. M. Agassiz lately discovered that the metamorphoses of some members of the family of the Scomberoids are still more unexpected. All icthyologists know the generic characters of the Dory (Zeus faber,) and the peenliarties which attach it to the family of the Scomberoids. Another fish, less known, but more curious, which lives also in the Mediterranean, classed with the Salmon family, or placed with the Argyropelecus hemigymnus, has been generally the salmon as a sub-family. Systemic authors have generally considered the Scomberoids and Salmon as very different fishes, the first being Acanthopterygians, and the second a Malacop terygian. But the Argyropelecus hemigymnus is nothing else than a young Zeus faber. Agassiz says he expects ichthyologists to declare this opinion erroneous, but, in reply, he invites them simply to compare specimens of Argyropelecus with young Dories, 8 to 10 decimètres in length.

sun.

Why the Wind Blows.-What, then, is the cause of the winds? The simple answer is-the wards stop up every chink by which air can gain If you light a fire in a room, and afteraccess to the fire, except the chimney, the fire will go out in a short time. Again, if a lamp is burning on the table, and you stop up the chimney, at the top, the lamp will go out at once. The reason of this is that the flame, in each case, attracts the air, and if either the supply of air is flame can not go on burning. This explanation, cut off below or its escape aboved is checked, the however, does not bear to be pushed too far. The off is, that the flame, so to speak, feeds on air; reason the fire goes out if the supply of air is cut while the sun can not be said, in any sense, to be dependent on the earth's atmosphere for the

of the flame because the facts are so well known. fuel for his fire. We have chosen the illustration If, instead of a lamp in the middle of a room, we were to hang up a large mass of iron, heated, we should find currents of air set in from all sides, rise up above it, and spread out when they reached the ceiling, descending again along the walls. The existence of there currents may be easily proved by sprinkling a handful of fine chaff about in the room. What is the reason of the circulation thus produced? The iron, unless it be extremely hot, as it is when melted by Mr. Bessemer's process, does not require the air in order to keep up its heat; and, in fact, the constant supply of fresh air cools it, as the metal gives away its own heat to the air as fast as the particles of the latter come in contact with it. Why, then, do the currents rise? Because the air, when heated, expands or gets lighter, and rises, leaving an empty space or vacuum where it was before. Then the surrounding cold air, being elastic,

forces itself into the open space, and gets heated in its turn. From this we can see that there will be a constant tendency in the air to flow towards that point on the earth's surface where the temperature is highest-or, all other things being equal, to that point where the sun may be at that moment in the zenith. Accordingly, if the earth's surface were either entirely dry land, or entirely water, and the sun were continually in the place of the equator, we should expect to find the direction of the great wind currents permanent and unchanged throughout the year. The true state of the case is, however, that these conditions are very far from being fulfilled. Every one knows that the sun is not always immediately over the equator, but that he is at the tropic of Cancer in June, and at the tropic of Capricorn in December, passing the equator twice every year at the equinoxes. Here, then, we have one cause which disturbs the regular flow of the wind-currents. The effect of this is materially increased by the extremely arbitrary way in which the dry land has been distributed over the globe. The Northern hemisphere contains the whole of Europe, Asia, and North America, the greater part of Africa, and a portion of South America; while in the Southern hemisphere we only find the remaining portions of the two last named continents, with Australia and some of the large islands in its vicinity. Accordingly, during our summer there is a much greater area of dry land exposed to the nearly vertical rays of the sun than is the case during the winter.-Cornhill Magazine.

ART.

Masterpieces of Industrial Art.-Messrs. Day have at length issued their great work-a representation, in colored lithography, of the principal Art-treasures contained in the International Exhibition, 1862, and designed as a sequel to that they published soon after the Great Exhibition, 1851. It is dedicated to the Queen, and is a right regal offering, for it contains three hundred prints, in most instances facsimiles of the objects pictured, and is, therefore, a worthy monument to the Exhibition, of which it will be a record long after that event is forgotten. Even now, it would be difficult to bring together a hundred of the hundreds of thousands of beautiful works collected at South Kensington; they are widely scattered; few of them were returned to their producers; their homes are in the mansions of the wealthy in Great Britain, where, although they continue to give enjoyment, they have ceased to be instructors. In these volumes, however, their teachings are perpetuated. There is no manufacturer of the kingdom. neither is there any artisan, who may not here acquire valuable lessons, that will add to his honor and to his prosperity; on this ground, chiefly, the work is to be commended and recommended. It ought to be a cherished guest in every Art-workshop; probably it is so; for, we believe, the list of subscribers contained the name of nearly every British producer of Artworks, and no doubt the work was obtained less as a luxury than a necessity. We gladly endorse the statement Messrs. Day have put forth regarding this most remarkable achievement:

"This important work, more complete than any of the kind published, is the most magnifi. cent, useful, and interesting souvenir of the International Exhibition of 1862-rendering with exact fidelity, both in form and color, the chefsd'œuvre of the world's progress in Art and industry. Its value is enhanced by the thorough independence with which the selection of examples was made-the only influence brought to bear on that selection being the merit of the subjects themselves,-which, as a series, form, both in style and size, an attractive and elegant work, and also as permanent models for all interested or occupied in the various arts and manufactures represented."

There is no class of Art or Art-manufacture that is not represented; we turn over page after page to refresh our remembrances of the wonderful assemblage of Art-treasures--such a collection as even the youngest among us are not likely to see again in England. They were indeed the treasures of the world, for there was no country that held back from a contest in which victory was almost sure to the swift and the strong; and now that we have obliterated from our note-book humiliating memoranda of fatal mistakes committed, generally from incapacity, but sometimes wilfully, we may contemplate with exceeding satisfaction the memory of a glorious assemblage of Art-wonders, that made the year 1862 memorable in Art history.

Here are the rare jewels, set with true Artpower, by the most famous jewelers of England, Italy, Germany, and France; plate, the value of which is a thousandfold beyond the cost of the precious metals of which they are composed; furniture of surpassing beauty, from a hundred renowned establishments; porcelain, rendered by Art of greater worth than gold: in a word, every class of Art manufacture is here, very few objects being omitted which the memory recalls with satisfaction and pleasure; each and all supplying lessons to Art-manufacturers for centuries to come.

We can not devote to this valuable work the

space to which, in review, it is entitled. It must suffice to say, there is no class of Artmanufacture unrepresented, and that consequently there is no manufacturer who may not study with advantage the works of his rivals side by side with his own. Mr. J. B. Waring, to whom was confided the duty of "selecting," and whose written descriptions accompany each print, merits the praise he has received for the entirely satisfactory manner in which he has accomplished his arduous and onerous task. Messrs, Lay have sacredly fulfilled the pledge they gave to the thousand subscribers by whose support the costly work was undertaken, and has been carried to completion.-Art Journal.

Maclise's "Death of Nelson."-This great picture is now finished, and will shortly be open to public inspection. The work is spoken of as completed, but all available time will yet be employed in re-touching parts which may seem to require strengthening; and although, by the ordinary observer, the details of this revision would be inappreciable, yet the effect will be felt as a whole. This magnificent painting having been already more than once minutely described in these columns, it is not now necessary to repeat the story of its composition, and

« PreviousContinue »