also assume, with the utmost confidence, that there will be no motions in Parliament by patriotic Irish members, especially as the time of election draws near, for the remission of a debt which they find it so very disagreeable to pay. There are in a thickly-peopled country two elements which go to make up the price of land; one is its use as an instrument of culture, the other the enhancement of its price as being a monopolised article; and we are to expect that the Irish peasant will be able and willing to pay the capitalised price as well as the interest due on the sum of both. It might have occurred even to the ardent patriot who has broached this scheme, that to buy out all the men of capital in the country and to transfer their possessions to persons having nothing, and burthened with a debt. which it is quite impossible they should ever pay, is not exactly the way to invite or to retain in Ireland that capital, too much of which she has never been accused of possessing. It is curious to observe that this plan is not proposed as a substitute for, but as a concomitant of, the repeal of the Union, so that one of the conditions preliminary to this promising experiment is that the whole landed property of Ireland is to change hands, and another that the new Irish Parliament is to commence its operations with almost all the men of independent fortune forcibly expelled from it, and the possibility of obtaining any taxes from the occupants of the soil postponed to the payment of two hundred and fifty millions. We can imagine (for is it not in print?) the proposal to invite England and Scotland to lend to a destitute peasantry two hundred and fifty millions, with the name of a member of Parliament appended thereto; but that this should be proposed as a preliminary to a repeal of the Union seems almost beyond the limits of possibility.

The time seems to have fully arrived when some clear and definite line of policy with regard to Ireland should be adopted and persevered in. It was very natural and very excusable to say, Let us do all the good we can and trust to time and patience for the rest. But things have now arrived at a point where it will be necessary to take and act upon some very clear and decided resolution. We might have gone on for a while longing and hoping for better things if we had not found ourselves involved in difficulties which, so far from diminishing, seem to increase with the lapse of time. A plan has been hit upon which dispenses with all the intellectual, or quasi-intellectual, qualities which have hitherto been considered necessary even for the low and grovelling tactics of obstruction. Just as in the arts, manual dexterity is superseded by machinery, so in the tactics of obstruction, it was at first supposed that the obstructor must at least have the faculty of fluent and relevant speech. This is, however, quite a superannuated idea; and we now exult in the discovery, for which we believe we are indebted to Mr. Biggar, that business may be quite as efficiently delayed by reading blue books as by speaking. Another discovery, for which we believe

there is no necessity to be audible, and that the House of Commons may, by good management, be detained a whole evening by an oration or a lecture of which it does not hear a word. There seems to be room for only one further improvement; that is, that it shall be enough for the speaker, so called by courtesy, to stand up without addressing the House at all, and then the triumph of misrule and disorder will be complete. We ought in fairness to add that Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit. Ireland has inoculated England, and arts which a little while ago were considered as purely Hibernian are now rapidly coming into vogue as a part of English tactics.

Are we then to yield to these shameful tactics which inflict almost as much disgrace on those who submit tamely to them as to those who invent and practise them? The idea is not to be entertained for a moment. The remedy is not to be found in rules, however stringent; for those rules would give rise to an excuse for endless discussion, whenever they were to be applied, as to whether the case was within them or no, and thus stimulate the very evil which they were intended to prevent. There is, we fear, no means of correcting this gross abuse of the privilege of free speech except by abridging the rights of the innocent as well as the guilty. Somewhere, probably in the speaker, must be vested a power which must be implicitly obeyed without defence or explanation of any kind. The question is not whether the House of Commons shall exist as it is now, but whether by the sacrifice of some of its most ancient and valuable privileges it can preserve the rest. The remedy will doubtless be sought and found, but most assuredly it will not consist in the repeal of the Union. It is in the power of a few members to disgrace the House of Commons. To bend them to their purposes is not in their power, unless the House will consent to make itself accessory to the crime. Whatever mischief obstruction may do, it will assuredly not effect the repeal of the Union.

Putting aside the proposals which we are favoured with from Ireland-the extermination of the present race of landed proprietors and the repeal of the Union-is there nothing which can be done by Parliament for her advantage? Will nothing find favour in the eyes of our countrymen on the other side of St. George's Channel but moonstruck folly and stolid obstruction? We should be sorry to

think so.

Were the office of Lord-Lieutenant a mere piece of useless frippery, a waste of so much public money and nothing more, we might pardon a solecism which logically it is impossible to defend. But the LordLieutenancy is something much more than what one might at first be inclined to consider it-a superannuated job. It is the standing memorial of a conquest, the evil memories of which seven hundred years of possession have been unable to blot out. It marks Ireland, and every reflecting Irishman must feel it as something quite distinct from any other part of our administration. It is rich in the memories

takes its name; while the Madonna, sunk on the road in utter lassitude, looks towards the spectator with an expression of almost stupefied fatigue, that touches Lucrezia's familiar features with a sublime pathos. The vigorous and splendid boy in her arms alone seems fresh and full of life, as if his companions had allowed him to feel none of the weariness of the way.

Vasari specially praises Andrea for his chiaroscuro, and for his mastery of the art of giving relief by subtle gradation of tone, instead of heaviness of shadow, so that his figures seem to stand, not on a mere painted surface, but on a background of liquid atmosphere. In a shadowed clearness as of twilight we see his solemn group of saints disputing on the Trinity, and seem to listen to their superhuman counsels as we gaze on the rapt earnestness of their faces, while the grave harmony of tone has no note of discord with the sublimity of the subject. In the foreground of this picture is a kneeling female figure with her back to the spectator, which as a piece of flesh treatment can scarcely be matched in the works of any painter, and more nearly approaches to antique marble. Here, as in Greek sculpture, the appearance of the softness and suppleness of nature is given by almost insensible gradation of relief, without the exaggeration of a single muscle; outline is distinct yet intangible, and we seem rather to feel than see the tender modelling of the form. As Andrea scarcely ever painted a figure even partially undraped like this, it is the more valuable as a proof that he refrained not from incapacity, but from a sense that such treatment would have been out of keeping with his subjects; in fact, from that calm artistic self-control, so wanting in Michael Angelo, who because he had studied anatomy could not bear to disguise a single muscle.

6

In the room adjoining that which contains the Dispute' is a small Annunciation by Andrea, which seems painted with a brush dipped in flame; yet while colour is here raised to the highest point of burning purity, we can as little call it glaring as the sunset sky which seems to open to our view the shadowless fires of heaven itself. It is a long panel, on which the two figures-robed the one in roseate orange, the other in ethereal crimson-are divided by a flood of golden light veiling the landscape in a luminous haze, while a heavy curtain falling at each side frames the celestial vision in a mass of neutral tint, like the tone of an evening cloud against the sunset which has forsaken it.

The Pitti contains a great number of other works by Andrea-a Holy Family, a Descent from the Cross, two large Assumptions, and several portraits of himself, one of them taken with his wife, in the act of showing her a letter, with a pleading expression, while she looks towards the spectator with an immovable look of resolve on her handsome features. In the same gallery is the beautiful St. John, which has just been the subject of an interesting experiment, having undergone the process of cleaning, newly invented in Italy, by which

which it left the painter's easel. Andrea is represented in the Tribune of the Uffizi by his Madonna of St. Francis, or of the Harpies, as it is called from a bas-relief in the foreground, painted originally for the Franciscan nuns of the convent in Via Pentolini, and sold by them in the first decade of the eighteenth century to the Grand Prince Ferdinand of Tuscany, on condition of having their church rebuilt. This majestic group consists of the Madonna and Child raised on a pedestal, with SS. John and Francis below. The figures stand out in a clear gloom like that of a cathedral aisle, and the whole seems painted in the neutral greys of a wild pigeon's plumage, save where a rich mass of crimson drapery in the foreground strikes the key-note of the chord of colour, and unites it into a grand and simple harmony.

The group of Four Saints by Andrea, in the Accademia delle Belle Arti, has the glow of a painted window, and rivals the Venetian school in its depth of colouring. The art with which conflicting shades of red-pure flame colour and the fullest damask crimson-are so arranged as to harmonise with, instead of destroying, each other, is in itself a study, while we have also an example of that use of neutral colour in which this master was unrivalled, introducing it in all gradations, from pale pearly ash to dense sullen smoke hue, to contrast and modify his other colours, always with consummate effect.

It is in these great works-not in his domestic weakness or political timidity-that we find the true life of the artist; and on glowing panel and frescoed wall we should look in vain for any trace of that infirmity of purpose which marred his character as an individual. Amid these creations of his genius we may be sure he could find a refuge in his lifetime from the sting of domestic annoyance, or the pressure of public calamity; and we may be allowed, while gazing on them, to forget the hen-pecked husband of Lucrezia, the ungrateful protégé of Francis, and think only of what has survived while these have passed away-the grand conceptions and faultless skill in execution of Andrea senza errori.'

E. M. CLERKE.

of all that we should wish to remember. It is a standing memorial of evil times and of evil actions. The Lord-Lieutenancy, which in the tyrannical hands of Strafford was little short of an absolute despotism, has sunk now to a pageant which exists for no better purpose than to perpetuate senseless pomp and to give an excuse for the useless expenditure of public money. A Colonial Governor with his Parliament and his young community which looks up to him for counsel and advice is a Prince in comparison with the Lord-Lieutenant of the present day. The office seems to exist for no better purpose than the support of the shopkeepers of Dublin. To the nobility of Ireland such an office placed over them must be anything but agreeable. They are placed under a peer often of inferior rank to themselves, and who is practically the subordinate of the Irish Secretary who does not always enjoy a seat in the Cabinet. Lord John Russell did on one occasion propose to abolish the office, but gave up the notion on a suggestion from the Duke of Wellington that in the case of a rebellion there would be no one to give orders. The telegraph and the railway have at any rate cleared away this difficulty, whatever it was worth, and made it quite certain that in the event of a rebellion we shall not lack either soldiers or commanders. The long and unvaried succession of failures which have hitherto attended every attempt to knit together the hearts and affections of two races, which ought to be as closely united in feeling as they are by geographical position, warn us not to be over-sanguine of success. But it is very difficult, when one is conscious of the most sincere desire to meet in every possible way the wishes of a race to whom we are indissolubly bound, to acquiesce in the belief that the effort is vain and the thing impossible. At any rate we should not sit down in despair till we have exhausted every means in our power, and that we cannot say we have yet done.

We are also bound to admit that, considering her size and her importance, Ireland has received but a scanty share of royal and political patronage. The residence of the Queen in Scotland has entirely eradicated old jealousies and disputes, and made the two parts of the Island one to all practical intents and purposes. Why should we despair of the effects of a similar treatment, when applied to a race so sociable and so susceptible to all kindly influences as the Irish? A hundred years ago the Duke of Rutland was sent over to drink the Irish into good humour. Times and manners have changed, but we cannot help thinking that the good humour and kindness, without the drinking, might, if exercised by some prominent member of the Royal family, produce the happiest results. At any rate, when we consider how great an effect may be produced on a sensitive and quick-witted people, by the wish to conciliate their goodwill and affection, we are inexcusable for not having long ago tried the experiment, and still more inexcusable if we leave it untried now. If the affection of the Irish people is worth having, it is surely worth seek