warbling, nor the loud shouting of boors, but a sustained and grave melody, able at once to soothe the sense of hearing and gently raise the soul to the thoughts of a higher life. "Sounds have a wonderful power in their own nature to affect the mind; and therefore the Holy Spirit, who is the Master of the Church, inspiring all its members, has appointed the enharmonic form of music which has strength without harshness, and gives delight without voluptuousness." He complains bitterly that the taste of his time had given preference to a degenerate and effeminate falsetto,* so that well-nigh all cathedrals and colleges had fallen into a corrupted use. The thought of these corruptions did but carry his mind forward to the ideal perfection of the future. His imagination could conceive a time when, through a knowledge of its inner and secret laws, Church music should be able to stir all Christendom to devotion, and convert the heathen. His mind recalled many examples of its power. Elisha had bidden his servants bring a minstrel to him that he might prophesy. St. Francis had been helped, by the soft playing of the cithara, to pass into the ecstatic state in which he heard the harmonies of heaven. He waxes yet bolder in his praise. Music, if it be but of the right stamp, has power to reform the depraved-lead the drunkard· to temperance-turn away the footsteps of the impure from the harlot's house-calm the passion of the wrathful. So Asclepiades had restored a madman to his reason; so David had freed Saul from his demoniacal possession. Of all dietetic exercises, singing, teste Avicenna, was the most healthful for body and for spirit. Yes; its power extended over brute creatures. Stags were drawn on by soft music, and horses roused to battle by the sound of the trumpet. And all these things were to him but presages and foreshadowings of a more perfect excellence. If all this was done by common instruments and hackneyed tunes, what might not be, if, in accordance with the secret principles of the science, instruments should be made of consummate skill and perfection, and all the forms and elements of music combine to produce a true and unmarred delight? Then, Students of This is, so far as I know, the earliest passage in which the word occurs. the history of music may be interested in knowing that the "Opus Tertium" (c. lxxiv.) contains (and is, I believe, the earliest extant book that does contain) the musical scale ascribed to Guido of Arezzo, in the eleventh century, with the verse of the old Latin hymn which determined its notation :— "Ut queant laxis Re-sonare fibris Mr. Hullah, in his "Lectures on Modern Music" (p. 29), states that Guido himself "makes no mention, in any of his works, of the sol-fa syllables." In Bacon's time, if he wrote as Mr. Brewer prints, they would seem to have been distinctly recognised. certainly, brute creatures would be drawn to submit themselves to our will, and be taken by our hands, astonished and led captive by that exceeding sweetness. And, in like manner, the minds of men would be raised to the highest pitch of devotion, to the fullest love of every virtue, and to all healthy and true activity."* As if conscious that his enthusiasm carried him farther than most men could follow him, he is constrained to add that this power of music is not common; that the vulgar herd of philosophers do not aspire after it, neither meditating on the teaching of the ancients, nor applying themselves to the test of experiment; and therefore what he has written is not known to many. Not the less does he repeat his conviction that it is most true-worthy of all acceptance by every wise He submits it to the Pope that he, seeing this ineffable power of music, might apply it to the right government of the Church. man. With this—the highest and noblest dream of the solitary thinkerI close the present sketch. Enough has been said, it is hoped, to give English readers, to whom his name was before associated only with a few scanty notices or grotesque legends, some notion of the life and character of one who may well claim a place among the highest group of English thinkers. It would not have been difficult to bring together amusing instances of credulity, vanity, irritability. Apocryphal books, wild legends, the boasts of astrologers and magicians, the strange stories of travellers, found a ready acceptance with him. He was not free from the egotism of most lonely and unappreciated students. I have thought it better to dwell chiefly on what was noble and heroic in him. If the writings have the interest of being prophetic of the future progress of science, the life has the yet higher attraction of having been a long and weary struggle the protracted martyrdom of one who loved truth and knowledge with a passionate devotion. How far we may go beyond the facts that have been stated here, and the inferences drawn directly from his writings, and endeavour out of scattered hints and characteristic traits to represent to ourselves the inner life of one who opens his heart so freely to us, is a question which I have endeavoured to answer elsewhere, and in another form. E. H. PLUMPTRE. "Op. Tert.," c. lxxiii. ANCILLA DOMINI: THOUGHTS ON CHRISTIAN ART. III. DURER AND THE ENGRAVERS. HE modern system of division of labour possesses great advantages for production, or for multiplying objects of trade, and perhaps for scientific research. It may hereafter tell not unfavourably upon popular art, when the element of beauty shall have been so far introduced into our manufactures, that our producers have good models to multiply. Faithful copies of gracefully-designed furniture or ornaments cannot be too common; and time may come when the tastes of our lower middle classes may be refined by large supplies of copies, correctly though mechanically made. Cheapness is no small object; and we suppose it will be the result of division of labour in artmanufactures as in all others. But in science and mental labour it is quite clear that this principle may be carried too far: and it is of course out of the question in true art, where the inventive faculty is in action, and where all is original and individual. It is remarked by the author of "Essays by a Barrister," that in almost every department of thought the process of division of labour is being carried on so quickly, that it seems by no means unlikely that we may at last arrive at a state of things in which the claim to any other sort of knowledge than a microscopic acquaintance with some particular department of some one branch will be regarded as an absurd presumption. The mere accumulation of knowledge in this form would have as little tendency to elevate and enrich the minds of its possessors; or to produce any broad or permanent advantages to society at large, as the collection of a vast number of bricklayers would have to raise a palace. Books which have produced the greatest effect upon mankind have seldom been written by men of profound special learning, but rather by persons who, having filled their minds with knowledge taken up at second-hand, have known how to make one subject bear upon another, and have so been able to draw novel and important conclusions from premisses furnished by the investigations of others in their special departments. This is perfectly true, although on the other hand there is no doubt that minds of ordinary power may be happily and well employed in minute analysis; and there is something very ennobling in the thought of those who contentedly bestow themselves on microscopic investigation, only in the hope of furnishing materials for synthesis in future ages, and who all contribute to a great induction, though in the end it may be labelled with the name of one man only, who was foremost to rush to its conclusion. But art is creative and not analytic, and artists are not so much engaged in search after principles as in applying them, or indeed in remodelling them. Division of labour in art can only mean varying the means of artistic expression, and confining one's self to particular means and instruments; and this at the present day is a practice strongly to be deprecated. The most perfect and powerful means of artistic expression are fully ascertained, and it is in fact waste of time to use the weaker, rougher, or slighter tools, when one can master the stronger and clearer. Sir Coutts Lindsay tells the Royal Academy Commission* how great a misfortune it is that art should be divided into different sub-professions. The old system, he says, was far preferable, in which every artist studied painting, sculpture, and architecture. Now the system is entirely opposite. Painters are divided into water-colour painters, oil painters, and crayon draughtsmen, and the consequence is, that they lose breadth of character, and never produce such works as they would otherwise achieve.† Mutatis mutandis, this agrees with Mr. Stephen's view on scientific investigation. But artists have not the excuse of being investigators, 'as has been said: the best vehicles and means for their work are ascertained, and the painter's business is to paint with the best tools he can get, not using inferior ones. No crayon draughtsman, for instance, is likely to make any discovery, in ever so zealous a pursuit of his employment, except that he had much better have given his time to water-colour; and John Lewis is an example how the most powerful and subtle water-colourist may come to the conclusion that he need not have denied himself the greater power gained in the use Evidence, p. 412. Ans. 3,854. † Mr. Holman Hunt and Mr. Watts bear similar testimony. Ans. 3,057 and 2,015. of oil. Finally, Michael Angelo said that fresco was work for men, and oil for women. Up to Dürer's time artists were not classed as painters, sculptors, and architects. Giotto could design the chapel of the Arena or the Campanile of Florence, and paint the frescoes on his own walls; and the mind of Michael Angelo, Leonardo, and Dürer himself could embrace nearly the whole circle of art, and have leisure for mechanics and engineering. Yet it may be interesting to consider how the painter of the "Adoration of the Magi," at Venice, the northern favourite of Venetian colourists—could give so much time, and in fact his highest and deepest thoughts, to hard and sharp steel engravings. We have already hinted at one reason for this: that most true colourists feel that subjects which involve hard, melancholy, or dubious thought are too painful for the use of the tints in which they delight. This we think will be illustrated by the works of the other great masters of pure chiaroscuro. We have before suggested an analogy between the illuminators, who worked in colour, with little regard to form, and none to light and shade, and the engravers, who expressed themselves in light and shade without colour. We cannot help feeling that the engravers were the sadder men, though perhaps the stronger and deeper. The illuminators were little troubled with musing on many things, as he must have done who bent long over the "Melancholia," well knowing her awful countenance of old. Their convent walls kept out the sight of evil, in a great degree at least. In few words, they seem generally to have enjoyed their work thoroughly, and to have been inventive rather than thoughtful. They were cheered all along by the delicate luxury of pure colour, called "sensuous," we believe, by non-colourists. Engraving was certainly better suited to the melancholy of the northern grotesque. Another thing to be considered is, that in Dürer's day the power of the press in multiplying transcripts of men's thoughts, both by pictorial and letter-symbols, was new and undefined, and apparently unlimited. It must have given intense pleasure to such a man to feel that the steel plate, once finished, might send his voice over Europe in a few months, and that by its means he might appeal, as by a book, to thousands who might never see his pictures, any more than they could have access to an original manuscript. There is an association which gives fair ground for comparison between the lives of men so far apart in time. and space as Dürer, Rembrandt, Blake, and Hogarth. They were essentially of the great middle class, burghers and citizens of credit and renown. Just now, when Mr. Arnold speaks so painfully of the English lower middle life, it may be as well to see what manner of men lived that same life, under perhaps even worse conditions for the production of great art or beauty, and what they made of it. It is |