There is such a thing as overfinish. The gloss on cloth which makes it beautiful to the draper is an abomination to the eye of the artist. Marble will take a high polish, but the sculptor leaves this capability to the mantelpiece manufacturer. Lines may be too sharp and forms too distinct. Nature rounds most of her forms, and blunts all her shadows by the breadth of the sun's disc. The first light which adjoins the shadow is only that of a speck of the sun's rim, and the sunshine brightens by degrees till the rays of the entire round clear the obstructing object.

Wear, which rubs off artificial colouring films, and bulges in or bursts hollow tinsel, almost always improves solid work. Wear rounds and softens long before it begins to obliterate. The beauty of old plate, which temperato splendet usu, partly arises from wear, though time also is a deliberately correct critic, keeping good articles in his strong room and sending bad to the melting-pot. Gold, not being subjected by tarnish to the daily friction of the plate-leather, only gets bruises from the hand of Time; and if wear is wanted it must be given by the artist. The emerybrush does in minutes what the plate-leather takes years to do, the same laws being put in operation by intention instead of by accident. If you wish to see the difference in picturesqueness between worn and unworn surfaces, you may look at the two bases of Westminster Abbey's front towers. One has been renewed in the old pattern, not Wrenovated in design like the unfortunate tops. The old one is blunt, soft, warm, and rich; the new one sharp, hard, cold, and poor. A little of the crumbling which so offends Mr. Ayrton will, I hope, in spite of silex washes and other nostrums, eventually improve the gingerbread palace hard by, whose eternal multiplications of monotony look like die-work.

A handsome nose looks well; but who

supposes

A statue would-all over handsome noses?

is foreign to our present plateresque studies, except as an illustration of the fact that overfinish is a vice of modern jewellery, as well, probably, as of most other modern art.

Mechanism has a tendency to overgrow and supersede art. The tricks of trade are deadly enemies to quaintness and originality of style. Before these tricks are acquired, a man conceives his idea, unwarped by stereotyped methods. His method grows round his idea as expedients arise out of difficulties. The hand of little experience hath the daintier sense.' Methods are the wealth which genius bequeaths to posterity; and like any other wealth, enables unworthy heirs to get on pretty well without brains. After Buckle has completed the world's gambits, this chequered existence will be a game not of skill but knowledge, and be played best not by the greatest genius but by the best memory for moves.

I

An original quaintness of style is the result of artistic feeling unhampered by conventional method. Before method is established all work is naturally quaint. In after times when established methods are voluntarily abandoned and ignored, quaintness usually runs into extravagance and affectation. once saw the effigy of a prancing bull carved on a slab of stone. I: was full of spirit and vigour. It was most evidently a lord of the herd in a dangerous humour. With arched neck and horns down he was taking action' with all his legs. Yet this baron of beeves was simply scored in the flat with deep strong outline, just as the white horse is cut in the chalk of the hill-side, and probably this monument may have belonged to the reign of Hengist and Horsa. No one in a much less primitive period of British sculpture, who had so vigorous and artistic an idea of the animal he was representing, would have been so little versed in method as to have escaped relief. If the bull had been artistically bad, any mason's lad might have cut it in the same manner last week. If it had been in relief,

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have come from the hand of an artistic stone-cutter of the present day as well as that of Phidias. It is the good artistic feeling, united with the rudeness of manipulation, which gives the archaic type. Of course, this is quaintness in extremity, but from the naked simplicity of extremes we often get definitions most clearly, sometimes, indeed, too sharp to be true; but comparative anatomy finds its axioins mostly in the skeleton.

The bull was a specimen of barbarous under-finish-the converse of that over-finish which indicates a period of ultra-civilization. Overfinish is mainly due to division of labour, which perfects mechanical processes by confining one pair of hands to the continual routine of one special department. The individual withers while the world is more and more' supplied with cheap pins. Division of labour is exceedingly good for the pin trade, but pins are not works of art. Indeed pins may be taken as a typical curse of modern civilization-the luxuriantly bristling excrescence of the thorny weed of makeshift, overgrowing ground that should be fruitful of design. All the pins a woman has about her, are so many confessions of inefficiency and incompleteness in the integral organization of her dress. Every pin is a slovenly substitute for what a little ingenuity in contrivance would make a permanent articulation of safe and easy fastening and unfastening. Hooks and eyes halfmasked under a projecting edge are nearly as bad. Buttons and clasps, when of efficient size, are legitimate subjects of ornament. Pins should have their points shielded, or at least the danger marked by being fitted with brooches. Ornament should set off use, and use should justify and limit ornament. Hairpins should be of gold or silver-practical, visible, and ornamental. A hairpin should be made of a stout wire seven inches long, bent into two prongs, with a neat flower, fruit, shell, or any other ornamental knob in silver or gold at the bend. Nothing is uglier than hair so put up

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by unseen pins that there is no apparent reason for its not coming down every moment. The ornamental pins, to be useful, must really support the hair, and not be stuck helplessly through an unmeaning bundle of plats and twists already trussed with a sheaf__of little black japanned staples. The same rule applies to an ornamental comb. It should really hold. Ladies have lately taken to a shameless theory, that ornaments for the head may be honestly worn of gilt trumpery. Nothing more exacts genuineness than head jewellery, the position being most conspicuous. Milliners have introduced this corruption by tinsel wreaths. Artificial flowers are all very well, but metallic wreaths should be made of thin gold and silver flowers, such as Ghirlandaio's father sold to the Florentine ladies on the ponte vecchio.

But to return to division of labour, from pins whose manufacture affords Adam Smith his well known illustration of that great economical element of wealth. Division of labour is as bad for works of art as it is good for pins.

The ornament which begins with the mere draughtsman and ends with the mere salesman, deteriorates at every stage in its change of hands from the original design. The plausible man behind the counter who only shows it off with nimble fingers, in its complete state, and applauds it with flowing phrases, exercises as malign an influence as any. He stands between the workman and the public. He is the opaque self-sufficient medium through which the ideas and suggestions of the wearer are bungled and distorted in transmission to the maker.

In days when goldsmithery was an art, the artist sat in his stall and took orders himself. If he was not the head of the establishment, a third of his remuneration for each special job went to his chief, and two-thirds to himself. So at least Benvenuto tells us in the story of the diamond lily he reset in gold for Donna Porzia Chigi. She finds him (a youth of three or

four-and-twenty) in her own palace, copying a Jove by Raphael, and asks him whether he is a painter or a sculptor. He tells her he is a goldsmith. She brings him a jewel and bids him value it. Convinced by his estimate that he is what he pretends, and by his drawing that he is a man of ability, she asks him if his courage suffices (se mi b'astava l'animo) to mount it afresh. He makes a design for it in her presence. She gives him the jewel, and besides, twenty gold scudi as material. Another, 'bellissima donna' who happens to be present, observes, 'If I were this young man, I should decamp with all this booty.' Donna Porzia rejoined that dishonesty and vertú rarely go together; this bello giovane draws too well and looks too much like an honest man to be a rogue.' Benvenuto makes a model in wax and shows it to the lady, that she may see how the design will come out in the solid. Also that he may improve on the drawing in the wax, and improve on the wax in the gold. She is highly pleased with the model, and he, confident in the growth of his design, promises her that the gold shall be as good again. Meanwhile, Lucagnolo, in whose shop he is working, reproves him for wasting his time on such small affairs; saying, he would see when they both came to be paid for the parallel jobs they had on hand, whether it was not better worth while to stick to large silver vessels as he (Lucagnolo) did. Lucagnolo was making a good-sized silver vase for Pope Clement to throw bones and refuse of fruit into from his plate at table. This vase, begun synchronously with Cellini's lily, is to be pitted against it for profit, and they work against one another to get their tasks out of hand as quickly as possible. Cosi messi mano, e in dodici giorni finii il detto gioello in forma di giglio, adorno con mascherini, fruttini,

animali, e benissimo smaltato.' When they are paid, Benvenuto's money is more than half as much again as Lucagnolo's, besides being all in gold coin, and accompanied with an assurance that it was only a small part of what his work deserved; e con molte altre cortesi parole degne di cotal signora,' Lucagnolo, what with shame be fore all the bystanders (brothers of the craft who had gathered to see the competition decided), and what with revulsion from the triumph with which he had just poured out what he deemed a crushing heap of dollars, was like to have fallen in a fit (and doubtless called in the barber chirurgeon that afternoon to let blood for a 'collera.')* And withal, my triumph was to his advantage, for the third part of my money came to him, because I was a workman; for this is the custom. Two-thirds go to the workman and the other third to the master of the shop. Yet his rash envy overbalanced thus his self-interest.'

Now-a-days our duchess does not make the acquaintance of the young man who sets her diamonds, in her own picture gallery; and it is partly in consequence of the intervention of the smug and smirking shopman (whose obliging manners behind the counter are much more largely rewarded than the labour of the smirched artizan at his bench), that the duchess has her diamonds less quaintly set than Donna Porzia. A good deal of amiable sentiment has been let off by patronizing young gentlemen who take a pleasure in assuring crowded benches of genteel small tradesmen's daughters in pink bonnets that the aristocracy take a deep interest in the working classes. The Mechanics' Institute movement has nearly gone the way of all respectable and well intentioned impostures, being pretty well known never to have touched the working class it was meant to benefit, at all. A far

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more practical point of contact might be found between consumers and producers, where their mutual interests directly converge. If those who use would take the trouble to find out those who make, and deal at first hand with them, not only would they get much better and cheaper articles, but art would blossom afresh as the great social problem of intercourse between long dislocated classes shook itself into working gear again. To become acquainted, there is no better method than to meet on business. Those who travel to observe the manners of foreign races, assume a profession, if they have none in reality, to bring them into contact with the natives. Let me recommend the sucking member of parliament who lectures on the working man's rights and grievances, to begin his investigations among the unexplored class by finding the man who makes his shirt studs. Ask the shop jeweller where you bought them, as a particular favour, to give you a letter of introduction to the very workman who made them. You might as well ask a stupid minister in the House of Commons what particular sub invented his crack measure. You would find it almost as easy to be present at a cabinet council, as at the actual making of a bit of gold

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smith-work, of which you have yourself made the working design, in order to give the workman a hint or two in the process of construction. The working jeweller is ashamed of the squalor of his workroom, he is afraid of losing the custom of his shop employers if he is known to deal directly with the public. He has, moreover, a foolish jealousy of the tricks of his trade becoming known. Indeed, some of his tricks, in the present state of his trade, might not bear the inspection of an intelligent customer.

But if the artistic public, who can give intelligible instructions and designs, would make a point of seeing in the flesh the very man who is to carry them out; if this choice public would firmly decline to treat as gold any alloy below the current gold coins of the realm; if it insisted on work wrought out of the solid, good artistic work from the hammer, file, graver, punch and scalper; artist goldsmiths would begin to have studios open to their customer, who, dealing at first hand, would be able to get what he wants executed accurately, in a much better style, quality, and mass, for the same price which is now lavished on huge showrooms, plate-glass windows, and smug shopmen.

G. J. C.