Shakspeare's conceit may be better than Mr. Massey's (there is not much to choose), but both are forced and fanciful, both play with the subject. Or, if we defend Shakspeare here just because he is Shakspeare, how shall we justify that metaphor from the lawyer's office, a few lines lower down,

and lips, O you,

The doors of death, seal with a righteous kiss

A dateless bargain to engrossing death.'

Romeo and Juliet was one of Shakspeare's youthful plays, but assuredly were one of our young poets now to perpetrate a metaphor so unnatural, a score of critical tomahawks would be straightway buried in his heart, and it would be long before he heard the last of small jokes about parchment and attorneys' clerks.

We bid farewell to Mr. Massey for the present, with hearty good wishes for the farther ripening of gifts which have already afforded us so much pleasure.

THIS is a clever book, attacking with considerable force that new school of art to which Mr. Ruskin has lent, of late, his powerful advocacy. The fight is a fair one. Mr. Young does not rail at his antagonist. By an admission as cordial, perhaps, as could be expected from an adversary, of Mr. Ruskin's great abilities, Mr. Young shakes hands before the contest. The exposure of the contradictions to be found in the eloquent pages of the Oxford Graduate is acute and unsparing. In fact, Mr. Ruskin is essentially a poet— an intense, impressionable nature. Those keen susceptibilities and that subtilty of thought which render his appreciation of art and of nature so admirable, are qualities which render him especially liable to change. Like all strong men, his strength is in some respects his weakness. Bravely and beautifully has he spoken out his thoughts, and made an epoch in the criticism of art. Of the spirit of his endeavour it is impossible to speak too highly. It has been (amidst all inconsistencies) his constant aim to win ac

knowledgment for the highest functions of art, to hallow it with the sense of consecration, to vindicate its divineness. In some of his examples we think him unfortunate; in some of his generalizations, too hasty and indiscriminate. Associating as he does all art with some moral purpose, a false style is to him a child of the devil-the true, a child of God. All his canons of taste are articles of faith. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the connoisseur in the mantle of the prophet should utter many a hard saying, and pronounce many a vehement denunciation. The enmity he has thus incurred is natural enough. He cannot suppose himself a martyr. Other men beside him have also made art a matter of conscience, and differ from him in their conclusions.

The words of Bacon, which Mr. Young has chosen for his motto, indicate very plainly his position :-"The world being inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things.' Such is the ground occupied alike by the lovers of Plato and the lovers of Bacon; in fact, by every idealist, as opposed to the Pre-Raffaelite and other theories, which say that art is merely imitative, and consists simply in a transcript, Chinese or photographic in its fidelity, of nature as we find it. It is Aristotle who says that poetry is an imitative art. But the great dramatists of Greece are poets according to Bacon's definition, not according to Aristotle's. They create, and do not imitate. What could be more unlike the daily life of the Athenian than the figures and the scenes of his tragic stage-those measured processional movements of the chorus about the Thymele that centre-piece of every scene-the iambics, the cothurnus, the masks, the music, the story itself, with its colossal Fate, working woe to demi-gods and kings? What more unlike actual life than the classic Unities? If the truth by which poetry is to be tested mean truth to the real life of to-day, what truth have the infernal and celestial scenes of Milton and of Dante, and where is the truth of

the Faery Queene? Mr. Ruskin quotes Carlyle, who says that Poetry is nothing more than 'higher knowledge;' and that, for grown persons, the only genuine Romance is Reality.' But Mr. Carlyle is an idealist, if ever there was one. In his philosophy it is our flesh and blood which is the apparition—the phantom; and reality can only be predicated of that Mind (divine and human) of which matter is the product, outcome, or manifestation. When, therefore, Carlyle speaks of reality, he never means the mere actual, but that actual as it is seen by the light of that higher truth and knowledge which are in the seeing mind. Thus Wordsworth's boor, to whom the primrose was but 'a yellow primrose,' and nothing more, did not see the reality, only the outside of the thing. Wordsworth, seeing beneath appearance-communicating, as it were, of his own soul to the flower, sees it truly-has the higher, because the inner, knowledge of it. When, therefore, Pre-Raffaelitism says that there should be no fantastic distortion or indolent neglect of the actual forms of nature-when it demands study, accuracy, and a thorough doing of all we do, it says what is right and true, but not altogether novel. But when (as a recent writer has remarked) it forgets that the eye is not a perfect organ, and must see many things obscurely, and lose many minutiæ, it is untrue to actual nature. If our eyes were magnifying-glasses, then it would be right to paint pictures which required a microscope. When PreRaffaelitism demands that the mind shall never colour with its own hues the forms of matter-that we ought to choose ungraceful or ugly forms in preference to beautiful ones, when the choice is equally open, because they are more common-when it denies that the soul is greater than the world, and may combine therefrom, or create for its solace and delectation-then is it poverty-stricken, prosaic, materialistic, and debasing. A man who says, I will not select a face brutalized by debauchery, and rubicund with grogblossoms, as a subject for my pencil, is surely not to be rebuked as a presumptuous mortal, wanting to improve God's handiwork, and conceited to take nature as she is. The artist so rebuked might

justly reply-God's work I will paint as faithfully as I can; but that nose, like half-a-dozen double strawberries, is not God's handiwork, but the devil's. And the same is true of lesser degrees of distortion. The sighing after an ideal-a belief that the creation travails towards some far-off deliverance—a longing for 'the light that never was on land or sea,' are the inalienable heritage of man. In fact, on the true principles of Pre-Raffaelitism, it is difficult to see what justification can be found for what Mr. Ruskin calls 'imagination penetrative,' and distinguishes as so essential to the highest poetry. That exercise of imagination must be rejected as 'a throwing of man's shadow on God's work.' Yet Wordsworth abounds in such impersonations or idealizations of natural objects, informing them with his own feelings, and making them speak his language. And in spite of his theory, he has given us an idealized, and not the actual country life of Westmoreland; and in verse, moreover, which rustics do not talk. If mere imitation stands so high, Mr. Ruskin should not regard the grainer's work as the pitiable, soul-deadening process he describes it. But he speaks at some times as slightingly, as at others highly, of laborious imitative finish. In the Modern Painters Mr. Ruskin has allowed Imagination a certain prerogative of selection and discretion which he would now seem to deny it.

We must refer the reader to Mr. Young's book for a fair reply to one of Mr. Ruskin's most fallacious dicta-that the characteristic of modern civilization is the denial of Christ. He confounds religion itself with the mere artistic manifestation of it. It is somewhat amusing to see Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin attributing a deep religiousness to your Abbot Samson, and others, because they never talked about religion, and declaring the reticence of our generation a proof that we have scarcely any religion at all. It must never be forgotten that religious art may become an easy substitute for religious life, and that it is much easier for a man to put his religion into a window than into his conduct. Heartily as we admire the true nobleness of the Middle Age, we do not sigh, as

Mr. Ruskin would seem to do, for the times when religion, in the hands of the magistrate, lent her sanction to every form of oppression, and the 'simple faith' of our forefathers was held in awe by the executioner.

Ruskin's' Notes on the Turner Gallery!'

THERE are those who think that Mr. Ruskin, having succeeded in bringing great numbers to an admiration of the once-neglected Turner, is now himself shifting his ground, and depreciating the idol he has set up. These 'Notes' certainly contain a large amount of censure mingled with praise, but not enough, we think, to justify such a suspicion. A certain class of large ideal landscapes were criticised unfavourably by Mr. Ruskin, even in the first volume of the Modern Painters. He reminds us of this fact, and repeats his objections. It is well to bear in mind that his worship is not without discrimination. Some of those pictures which most puzzled and provoked the public by their frantic incoherence and obscurity, were painted, he acknowledges, in the decline of Turner's genius. Such a painting as Undine Giving the Ring,' Mr. Ruskin places in the same relation to Turner's other works with that occupied by Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous to the earlier novels of Scott. At the same time, the Pre-Raffaelite tendency has, we think, grown upon him so far as to place him in antagonism to certain true and noble sayings in his own early works. He cannot occupy the extreme of the Pre-Raffaelite position without falling into manifold self-contradiction. In these very 'Notes' he does not consistently maintain the position that art is purely descriptive, not didactic. Finding fault with the Decline of the Carthaginian Empire,' he blames Turner for working in this picture only for show, and painfully striving to set forth something that was not in his heart, and could never get there.' Here the admission is made that an artist ought to set forth in a picture, or that he may,what is in his heart. But it is of the very essence of Pre-Raf