he had then much of its external appearance. Nevertheless, his genuine contempt for what was intellectually feeble was not accomplished by an even adequate appreciation of his own powers. At college, however, his satirical "Hear, hear," was a formidable sound in the debating society, and one which took the heart out of many a younger speaker; and the ironical" How much?" with which in conversation he would meet an overeloquent expression, was always of a nature to reduce a man, as the mathematical phrase goes, to his "lowest terms."

'In maturer life he became much quieter and mellower, and often even delicately considerate for others, but his inner scorn for ineffectual thought remained, in some degree, though it was very reticently expressed, till the last. For instance, I remember his attacking me for my mildness in criticizing a book which, though it professed to rest on a basis of clear thought, really missed all its points. "There is a pale whitey-brown substance," he wrote to me, “in the man's books which people who don't think take for thought, but it is n't," and he upbraided me much for not saying plainly that the man was a muff.'

The last thing that you would deduce from Walter Bagehot's essays would be that he was the sort of man who would suffer muffs gladly. He does not peptonize, he makes clear. The process of digestion is left to the reader. A pleasant acidity of expression pervades his work like a sauce piquante, or, better, like that squeeze of lemon which is permitted to give, dare I say, a kick to certain delectable dishes-deviled whitebait, grilled sole, turtle soup, and Whitstable oysters. He introduces it with his literary, political, and even financial dishes, making the dullest of them, for he reveled in dull subjects, palatable.

For example, while criticizing the failure of a certain brilliant Chancellor of the Exchequer, he said: "The faculty of disheartening adversaries by diffusing on occasion an oppressive atmosphere of businesslike dullness is invaluable to a parliamentary statesman.' "The business of a critic is to criticize,' he said again, 'it is not his duty to be thankful.' And scattered over his work are such phrases as: 'French is the patois of Europe, English the language of the world'; 'In every country common opinions are very common'; 'Affection as a settled subject is incompatible with art.' On every page there is some such seasoning, piquante, acrid even, but never sour, and only bitter in the sense that many excellent tonics are bitter, stimulatingly bitter.

He is equally good at flashing a portrait in a phrase. Each of his essays on writers, such as those on William Cowper, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Milton, Clough, Crabb Robinson, is given a humanizing touch, often no more than a hint, which instantly brings you into personal touch with the subject.

Here are a few of his flashlight portraits Swift: 'a detective in a dean's wig.' Sydney Smith: 'an after-dinner writer.' 'Mr. Disraeli owes his great success to his very unusual capacity for applying a literary genius, in itself limited, to the practical purposes of public life.' 'Lord Brougham had the first great essential of an agitator the faculty of easy anger.' Lord Lawrence: 'A Nasmyth hammer which can chip an egg or flatten an iron bar, but only within its groove.' Horace Walpole: 'Not a very scrupulous narrator; yet it was too much trouble even for him to tell lies on many points.'

The sense of the personal was a powerful ingredient of his sense of reality. A work of art for him was not a segregatable thing, but an expression

of an individual which was the more valuable because it was humanly associated with the scheme of things. The method has its dangers, which Bagehot generally managed to avoid. But occasionally he slipped badly because innocently.

An instance occurs in a comparison between Keats and Shelley in the essay on the latter. He points out that He points out that Shelley is an abstract student, anxious about deep philosophies,' and Keats the exact opposite, whose love of sensation prompted him to pepper his tongue, 'to enjoy in all its grandeur the cool flavor of delicious claret.' So far all is well, but he goes on to say that 'When you know it [the pepper story], you seem to read it in his poetry.' Exact criticism, if such there bewhich is more than doubtful - would have deduced this peculiar sensuousness from the poetry instead of introducing it from the personalia of the poet. Personality may be used as comment; but a poem or any other work of art must stand alone. It is to be judged finally on its own personalityor merit and not that of its creator. Walter Bagehot realized this oftener in practice than in theory. His conclusions are sometimes more convincing than his methods. During his law training he distinguished himself in the art of special pleading, and his critical method reveals the tricks and weaknesses of the special pleader. But he is generally saved by instinctively sound judgment, which with wide reading and infinite patience enable him to build up his case for or against an author with exquisite justice, buttressed by a wealth of valuable and interesting evidence of fact, opinion, and speculation.

All criticism is colored by the mental attitude or predilection of the critic: criticism in the last resort being personal opinion, and its final value being

the quality of taste which inspires it. Bagehot had an orderly brain and he preferred an orderly to a disorderly scheme of things both in art and life. If he had many of the characteristics of his period, he escaped most of its faults. He was rational without being a rationalist; he had ideals, but was not an idealist. He was lucky in the possession of a temperament which did not fit into a category. He came nearest to pigeonholing himself in his regard for form. He was, in a sense peculiarly his own, classical rather than romantic.

'Men of genius may be divided into regular and irregular,' he says in his masterly essay on Charles Dickens. 'Certain minds, the moment we think of them, suggest to us the ideas of symmetry and proportion. Plato's name, for example, calls up at once the impression of something ordered, measured, and settled: it is the exact contrary of everything eccentric, immature, or undeveloped.' Of the two he preferred the regular because he believed that 'symmetricalness' and 'proportionateness' were the ordained methods of the highest and most powerful expression.

At the same time his austerity was tempered by recognition and appreciation of the warmth of humor and the acid of satire. He refers good-humoredly to 'the faculty of making fun'; in another admirable study, that on William Cowper, he finds the 'best charm of this earth' in 'the medley of great things and little, of things mundane and things celestial, things low and things awful, of things eternal and things of half a minute.'

Tennyson, and Browning: the speech of Belial in Paradise Lost for the Pure; Enoch Arden for the Ornate; and Caliban upon Setebos for the Grotesque. Fault could be found with some of his conclusions, but his analysis is both luminous and instructive.

At the moment, however, we are reviewing Bagehot, not criticizing him, and it is only necessary to note that his grading down is from the classical to the romantic; it should be noted also that he does not deny either genius or art to what he does not happen to approve - provided, of course, genius and art are there, as they are pretty generally in Caliban upon Setebos, and occasionally even in Enoch Arden.

His definition of pure literature is that which 'describes the type in its simplicity... with the exact amount of accessory circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in finished perfection, and no more than that amount.' It is the 'last grace of the self-denying artist,' and makes you recall not the artist but 'the exact phrase, the very sentiment he wished.'

The opposite to this is ornate literature, which 'wishes to surround the type with the greatest number of circumstances which it will bear. It works not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation.' Contrary to the pure style, it does not present an idea with 'the least clothing it will endure, but with the richest and most involved clothing that it will admit.'

He refers, with a modern touch, to the rouge of ornate literature, in which nothing is described as it is, everything having about it an atmosphere of something else. It is the literature of illusion-romantic literature and he likens it again with agreeable modernity, very topical in our day, to 'the sudden millionaires' who 'hope to dis

guise their social defects by buying old places and hiding among aristocratic furniture.' Ornate art is like moonlight 'it gives a romantic unreality to what will not stand the bare truth.'

The third type, the grotesque, differs from the others where they most resemble one another. 'It takes the type, so to say, in difficulties. It gives a representation of it in its minimum development, amid the circumstances least favorable to it, just while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is encumbered with incongruities.' This art found its highest expression in the architecture of the Middle Ages. It is scarcely distinct from the ornate or romantic art.

Browning is a good example of the type among poets, and Bagehot makes good use of him, less soundly than he does of Tennyson in the earlier class, proving that even good critics are fallible, and that not even the best of them could understand a phenomenon such as Browning in 1869. It sounds more grotesque even than Caliban upon Setebos to be told, as Bagehot tells us, that Browning 'puts down what is good for the naughty and what is naughty for the good' almost as grotesque as Oscar Wilde's 'Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning.'

It is well to recall the work of this masculine interpreter of ideas and life at a time like the present, when new methods in art are passing into premature conventionalism and even idolbreaking has become a 'fashion.' It is time to turn our backs on the successors of the ornate and the grotesque and to contemplate the last graces of the self-denying artists. In our retirement we may profit by association with Walter Bagehot, with whom we shall not always agree, but whose clear thinking and sane preferences will command our admiration.

THE pictorial art of the East, so far as Persian and Chinese elements are concerned, has been fully dealt with by several eminent authors; the former especially by Dr. F. R. Martin, and the latter by Laurence Binyon, Aurel Stein, and some others. Two authors have written upon Indian drawings as well, but in nothing like so full a manner, and the subject seems to call for further treatment. Much has been written and learned in the last twenty years; more is still to learn. Some fine collections have been formed, and it is not yet too late to find, in England and Europe, specimens of this most interesting branch of Indian art.

These drawings are usually small, seldom larger than small folio, the majority being about octavo. They are, in their original condition, surrounded by several borders of strips of paper painted in running design, and the whole picture completed with a wide margin, which is also usually finely painted either with floral sprays or, in earlier types, with spots of gold leaf, which give a jeweled effect. The drawing is in body color, built up on a white ground; the paper consists of several thicknesses pasted together to obtain the requisite stiffness; the colors employed are all of native manufacture, very permanent, and compare favorably with the colors used in illuminated manuscripts of the fifteenth century.

The earliest Indian drawings are book-illustrations; but quite early in the existence of the art the picture, as a separate leaf to be handed round

to assist a story-teller's narrative, or purely as a piece of decoration, became the rule.

The origin of the art is roughly this. The Emperor Babar on his return from exile brought to India some Persian artists, and his grandson Akbar and the two immediate successors Jehangir and Shah Jehan encouraged the work of the Indian artists, who carried on the Persian tradition upon Indian lines. Probably also certain influences can be traced from the Herati school of painting. But from whatever sources the genesis of the drawings developed

Persia, China, and Herat all had a share in a few generations the art had become purely Indian. Of all the arts of Hindustan the miniature drawings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the truest and liveliest reflection of the history, religion, poetry, and, above all, the domestic life of the Indians that we possess.

A knowledge of the existence and an appreciation of the beauty of these drawings is no new thing to Europeans. Rather one is inclined to believe that their artistic merit has been overlooked or forgotten in the last fifty years or so. Otherwise it is difficult to account for the utter extinction of the art and its artists in India. Apart from the wellknown story that Rembrandt drew his inspirations for night scenes from Indian drawings-night scenes being some of the most successful creations of the Indian artist - and the fact that Sir Joshua Reynolds himself was highly appreciative of their superb beauty,

we have proof of their popularity with the servants of 'John Company.'

In many old English houses small collections of these drawings have been and are still found, many, alas, dampstained either from neglect, or monsooned during their eighteenth-century owners' long residence in India. Probably they were brought home when the 'Nabob' finally retired, and were cherished as memorials and illustrations of his former life. In this connection we know of a Sheraton writingdesk which once belonged to Warren Hastings, and is decorated with a typical Krishna drawing of the Jaipur school.

Let it be fully understood - these drawings were not cheap bazaar productions, but the work of highly skilled artists. The reason we have for thinking that some of these collections were made in the eighteenth century or, at any rate, before the Mutiny, is the fact that the finest specimens are in England, and that few can be obtained in India, and the majority of the drawings are eighteenth-century work. The most numerous are portraits of princes, rulers, and Indian noblemen. Sometimes one finds portraits of European officers and merchants, but not frequently. Our ancestors seemed to prefer to wait for the infrequent arrival in India of such artists as John Chinnery for their portraits. In fact, one point of interest in the early Indian drawings is the total lack of European influence. Those which are unmistakably copies of European paintings are rather caricatures than serious studies of European ideals.

Probably it is the portraits which appeal to us most, they are so entirely human. The exquisite and minute workmanship, -every hair of beard and eyebrow seems to be drawn separately, the whimsical character-studies of some exalted graybeard, and the

dainty beauty of the harem ladies, cannot fail to enchant us. The details of garments, weapons, jewels, especially the ropes of pearls and Oriental stones entwined in the turbans, are masterpieces of artistic accuracy.

So numerous are the portraits of wellknown Indian characters in existence that it has been well said that we know the features of the personnel of the Courts of Akbar and his two successors far better than we do those of Elizabeth, James the First, and Charles the Second.

The art is divided in the first instance into two main schools, Mughal and Rajput (or Pahari), which can be further divided into schools representative of the towns where the industry flourished, Jaipur, Delhi, and Lahore being the best known. The Mughal school, as its name denotes, refers to the work of Court artists, and is reminiscent of the original Persian influence. The majority of Mughal drawings are book-illustrations, and many of these illustrate subjects from the Shahnamah of Firdusi, but we also find portraits, hunting, battles, and scenes of Court life. The very best of the miniaturists' work is really found in the Mughal school. In the Kangra (Rajput) school,—which is Hinduist as opposed to the Mohammedanism of the Mughal school, we frequently find religious subjects, episodes taken from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and also fine portraits somewhat different in type from the Mughal examples.

It has been pointed out that these carefully worked miniatures will bear enlarging to the size of a wall panel without requiring any further elaboration of detail or composition. With regard to the composition it is noticeable that the majority of the drawings have a central figure, not necessarily in the centre of the paper, but one to which all the other figures in the picture