manners. Our English artists only require daily association with the best Grecian and Italian works; they only want to make Phidias, Raphael, and Michael Angelo their companions in youthful years, when their style is still in course of formation, and all that falls beneath the purest standards would, we may reasonably hope, be effectually eradicated.

Glancing at another branch of our subject, we cannot but point to Rome as the natural centre of the "Catholic," or so-called "Christian," school. The Church of the Catacombs, the Church of the Martyrs, the Ship of St Peter tossed upon troubled waters, still finds refuge within the walls of the Eternal City. From century to century the pilgrim has hither bent his steps; and from all nations of the earth have crowded multitudes who sought as surance to their faith or consolation in their suffering. The convents and monastic orders scattered over the wide world here find in Rome a common focus; the distant missionary, planting a church in the isles of the Pacific or on the plains of Tartary, points to the Roman Propaganda for his authority. Every church in Catholic Christendom owns the sway of the great Basilica of St Peter; and thus the seven hills of the ancient city, crowned with the campanile of convents and churches, has long claimed the allegiance of the ecclesiastic, moved by piety or swayed by ambition, and of the civil ruler who sought to add to temporal dominion the sanction of spiritual power. Rome is strong, too, in the spell of imagination.. The mind reverts to the early days when the Church was first planted -when persecution and death were the reward of faith-when the Christian victim graced the Roman holiday-when from within the vast sweep of the Flavian amphitheatre rose the loud shout of exultation as the martyr sealed his testimony with his blood; and then come to the memory, in the course of succeeding ages, the times

of final and signal triumph. Imagination now revels in glowing pictures of wealth and power and pomp: popes, who trampled on the necks of kings; humble saints approaching on bended knees; genius rearing temples the most noble; gifted artists emblazoning, in characters of gold and in forms of unearthly beauty, the victory of that Church which at length obtained undisputed supremacy. It is here, in Rome, that the so-called "Christian" artist can live in that rapt attitude- can indulge in those visions of saints and of angelscan cultivate that mystic faith and fervour which was found triumphant in Beato Angelico, and in other devout Pre-Raphaelite masters.

This is a phase of faith which in other portions of Europe may be growing day by day more impossible; but in Rome we look upon this emotional worship, this imaginative and poetic colouring to belief, as natural and almost inevitable. With a certain order of dreaming, impressible minds, art, in all her visions and heavenly revealings, ceases to be a fiction, and grows into a reality, is not so much a refined enjoyment as the required food for an insatiable craving. Men of this frame of intellect are almost of necessity found in the Eternal City; for, as we have said, by the law of natural selection, Rome is their home. In Dusseldorf we all know there has been a "Christian" school, and in Munich are many important religious works. But we have always felt that north of the Alps the "Christian artist" is out of his appointed latitude. And, accordingly, the great disciples of this pictorial faith have always tended to southern migration. It was in Rome that the school of Veit, Cornelius, and Overbeck, took its origin. It was in this bosom of the Catholic Church that they became Romanists. It was in the midst of Christian temples, it was in the presence of Angelico, Perugino, and Pinturicchio, that they refashioned

and reanimated that medieval style which, once a derision, they have at last succeeded in making a devotion. Our English school of PreRaphaelites has, of course, nothing in common with these their modern German forerunners; and we do not think that a Romish revival of the medieval is for British art greatly to be desired. Still we deem a Christian school of religious painting, purged from any possible corruptions of Romanism-a reformed art which, it must be confessed, has hitherto claimed scarcely an existence in any Protestant community -to be for England a high desideratum. Our boasted Protestantism has suffered, we think, especially in former times, from being cold, bald, and unpictorial. At all events, religion is the most worthy theme that can engage the painter's pencil; and any national school which practically ignores the sublimest emotions which stir the human breast, denies to itself the highest inspiration, and renounces the noblest sphere of its mission. But, from the considerations which we have urged, we think it is greatly to be feared that any attempt to create such a school in academies north of the Alps will be more or less futile. The divine unction will be wanting. It is in the deep fountains of the Italian middle ages, it is before the shrines of Madonnas and saints, that inspiration must be sought.

There is yet another style of pictorial art to which we must advert before we close. It must be admitted that, in the present aspect of our English school, historic landscape is at a discount. It is now the fashion almost to despise the imaginative scenes of Wilson and Loutherburgh. The subjects now most in vogue with our rustic rural painters are hedgerows and lanes in Devonshire, and pebbly trouty streams in North Wales. Yet Turner, whom most people still affect to admire, chose to enhance, it will be remembered, some of the grandest landscapes in nature by an

appeal to historic association and the pictorial adaptation of mythologic fiction. It is one of the good practical services rendered by Turner's fairy enchantments, now happily so well seen at South Kensington, that they transport the mind from the smoke and din of London streets to the romance of Italy and the golden splendour of the southern sun. "Lake Avernus," " Æneas with the Sibyls," "Caligula's Palace and Bridge,' "The Bay of Baiæ,"

Apollo and the Sibyl," take us to that wreck of glory, to that sea-worn shore, where the crumbling ruins are mantled by the clambering vine, and the shadowed grotto is curtained by dripping verdure hanging in cool festoons. Turner's "Ancient Italy," too, is that land "which was the mightiest in its old command, and is the loveliest." And in "Dido building Carthage," and in "The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire," we are taken into the far off region of historic romance, where fact is lost in the haze of fiction, and actual forms are blended into that poetic halo-the atmosphere, in fact, wherein the genius of Turner loved to bask and bathe itself. Whoever has indulged in these poetic reveries; whoever has walked the shore of Salerno and Amalfi, or paced, on the road to Naples, the streets of that "City of the Dead ;" whoever has wandered through the Roman Forum by moonlight, or ridden over the Roman Campagna, heaving and swelling as a troubled sea, wreck-strewn; whoever, we say, has tasted of these high and subtle delights, must recognise that the field of Italy is the sphere for the imaginative artist, who would love to people the landscape of a beauteous nature with the glowing memories of the past. Our English park-scenery is stately, our country mansions are venerable, our rural districts of simple beauty; but there is something about the gardens of Albano and Frascati, the villas and palaces of Rome, and the byways of desolated Italy, which incite the imagination

still more exquisitely, and touch the feelings with a deeper pathos. What a hushed quietude and delicious languor steal over the daydreams of our walk as we saunter along the mossgrown paths, ilexshaded, of these suburban villas! We tread a softer turf, we look into a more liquid sky, we listen to a gentler sound, the dripping of the fountain, or the slumbrous evening breeze among drooping leaves. In those dark shadowy pines, what sheltering wings spread against the heat of day, what deep gloom for our seclusion! And then, again, those avenues of cypress, how solemn, like dark funereal tapers, or as a slow black-robed procession marching towards some distant shrine! And here below, among the undergrowth of less ambitious wood, what wayward wanderings of wild fancy, what bold playful flights of vegetative exuberance, how much prodigality of resource, assuming, in hours of undisguised ease, the indolent attitudes of repose a wilderness of tangled vegetation, deep in coolest shade! Trees, too, there are which wander into the distance, more independent in their modes of life, straying away from the companionship of close clustering arms, to sport in open sunshine on the flowery sward. It is an Eden-but Eden since the fall, for Malaria keeps demon watch over the loveliness. And thus Italy, long under the curse of tyrants, and her air polluted by the breath of crime, is ever, even in beauty, veiled in tragedy, and hours of love are oft avenged in treacherous death. And this is the drama of the Italian landscape, this the deep background of mystery, this the dark historic association which gives to every ruin its witching hold on the imagination. The crushed arch, the broken aqueduct, and the fallen column, tell of a nation's overthrow; the very stones seem graven with imperishable story; the deep furrows of their decay mark the rude tread of the conquering barbarians,

and the sun which gilds the ruin sinks red in the blood of a suffering people. We have said enough to show why Turner, Wilson, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and Claude gloried in that land where native poetry and history revel in the midst of beauty. And men of kindred genius will for all time seek the same congenial soil.

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It might, perhaps, have been supposed that a paper on "the ArtStudent in Rome" would have indulged in more anecdote and less of dissertation. We might, indeed, have interspersed pleasing pictures of sketching tours at Tivoli or among the Sabine hills; we could have drawn picturesque portraits of the rustic peasantry; girls standing at the fountain, matrons with the distaff tending flocks upon the mountain-side, or sitting beneath the ilex shade in the heat of day; we might have planted a sketchingstool among the silvery spray of Tivoli or Terni, where the iris looks down upon the "hell of waters" as love watching madness; might have taken hand in hand with sketching-book the sonnets of Petrarch or the tales of Boccaccio, and in the pauses of our work fallen into the melody of verse, the romance of rapturous story, interwoven with wild notes of song caught from the mountain echoes. Such days, bright in these delights, are long to be remembered. For if the mind loves to cherish some one period of its former history more than others, it is, we think, those hours when the poetic nature first kindled into sensitive enjoyment, when the still slumbering powers of fancy, stirring with undefined longings, found in a world of beauty a sphere of unimagined bliss, saw in the laughing landscape the answer to youthful gladness, and in the passing shadow the flittings of far off sorrow. If the artist's life be envied, it is for scenes of subtle refined emotion such as these, wherewith minds of grosser frame are not permitted to intermeddle. The painter may be denied, perchance,

the luxuries bought by gold, but he is chosen for nature's favourite and playmate, and shares the bounties which are showered upon the lilies of the field. He may boast of no high birth or long lineage, but his is the heritage of the sky. The poet, in the well-known lines of Schiller, comes too late to take his part in the division of the world, and the gods, in recompense, make him a denizen of the heavens. And surely, if in any favoured spot of earth the artist be given a charmed existence, it is in the clime of Italy. The sun showers richly his golden

rays and the moon her silvery beauty; the landscape is fertile in the olive and the vine; and life moves onward in tranquil contentment, devoid of care. Nature is everywhere making pictures, and man weaving a romance. And the student has but to surrender himself to the poetry of the passing hour to make his mind a welcome habitation for all the beauteous thoughts that flock on every side; and thus fostering in himself the artist growth, his works will be true to the nature that lives around him and the genius which prompts within.

"WHAT do they think of us in England?" was said to be one of the questions of late most frequently heard in America. And what, we should like to ask, do they imagine that we think of them? That they are the greatest and noblest people on the face of the earth? That they are just, moderate, and dignified in peace, and strong and irresistible in war? Do they picture us as viewing their government as a thing to be envied by the rotten old monarchies of Europe? Do they fancy that they are impressing all nations with the belief which they profess themselves to entertain of the immeasurable advantages of the constitution of the Union over every other constitution that the world has seen, and that we are lost in admiration of the system which has led inevitably to their present condition in the cabinet and the field? Or do they not know that we must feel as all men feel in viewing the exposure of the empty pretensions of a bully, and that we cannot even pretend to keep our countenance when the exploits of the Grand Army of the Potomac are filling all Europe with inextinguishable laughter? If everybody is amused when Ancient Pistol is made to eat

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