moonlight. The Spirit should not be transparent, as he is often painted. He should be a warrior in complete steel, but he should cast no shadow. By this distinction the apparition would wear a spectral aspect, and yet preserve the identity marks of 'the King that's dead.' It is strange that so simple an expedient has never occurred to the painters. These instances must suffice. A few general remarks on the possible future of Shakespearean illustration remain. Are we entertaining too sanguine a hope if we venture to look forward to the day when that which Boydell attempted shall be carried out on a far grander scale? In spite of the declarations of pessimists, the British School of Painting has in it the signs of life and the stir of activity. It is unfortunate for the early realisation of our project that nearly all its highest triumphs lie in landscape and genre art. The genius of the nation lies in this direction, and landscape painters and genre painters cannot cope with the grand plays of Shakespeare. The Vicar of Wakefield was for years the favourite subject for illustration by competitors for the honours of the Academy, and men with the level aims that suffice for most students were undoubtedly wise in choosing subjects from the most charming domestic idyl ever written. But we would not discourage the genre painters or the landscape painters from attempting Shakespeare. In his pages there is something for everybody. The genius of Turner might have found inspiration in the gorgeous cloud-picture in Antony and Cleopatra,' the home-loving pencil of Wilkie might have employed itself with Dame Quickly and Sir Hugh Evans. We do not deny that the adequate illustration of Shakespeare implies the existence of an historical school of painters, but not such a school as poor Haydon attempted to found. To adopt the somewhat antiquated terms of a controversy, which in its essence can never become obsolete, we want a romantic not a classical school. The success of individual painters with particular scenes and characters gives us hope that something may be done. Mr. Millais has twice chosen Shakespeare subjects, Ophelia' and 'Ferdinand lured by Ariel.' Mr. Holman Hunt, though he has latterly addicted himself to sacred art, made flesh and blood men and women of those somewhat dainty shapes Valentine,' 'Sylvia,' and 'Proteus.' Mr. Marks has caught the humours of Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph, in his 'Falstaff's Ragged Regiment.' In the less ambitious walk of book illustration we have seen that Sir John Gilbert has frequently seized with rare tact the spirit of a character, and the picturesque and dramatic point of a situation. Though we are told that to theatrical managers Shakespeare spells ruin, we may trust that to women. to painters the poet's name may be one of happier augury. The circle of Shakespearean students is ever widening, and the national taste we trust is growing higher and purer. Some of the poet's creations must remain unrealised until a kindred genius shall arise to embody them on canvas. We have seen how inadequate have been the attempts of many richly gifted men to translate the immortal poetry of Lear' and 'Macbeth' into the language of the palette. We may still confess our failures, and say with Horace Walpole, 'Salvator Rosa might;' but as in the universe so in Shakespeare, there are more worlds than one; and though the world of imagination, passion, and terror, lies beyond the reach of all save the mighty masters, whose appearance on our planet makes an epoch in its intellectual life, we have the other world of pathos, humour, and action, and here English artists might fairly be expected to excel. Shakespearean painters must steer their way between the Scylla of the high classical school and the Charybdis of theatric imitation, for the characters in the dramas are not statues or stage-players-they are men and Even the Homeric heroes in Troilus and Cressida ' are not the heroes of the Iliad; but take the robuster shape given them by the strength and pregnancy of the Gothic mind,* and the players in Hamlet' are not always 'robustious periwiggedpated fellows' but commonplace mortals talking in natural voices before they don the buskin and the spangles. Turner's style was Isaid to have been based on Nature and Girtin.' It would be a glorious thing to see an English School of Painting based on Nature and Shakespeare, and paying back its debt to its founders by illustrating the creations of the dauntless child' in the multiform shapes, profuse colours, deep shadows, and dazzling lights of the mighty mother.' For if we have discerning eyes we shall see that Shakespeare, of all men, had discovered the secrets of composition, and that there is a sense in which Lear' is as instructive to the artist as the ceiling of the Sistine, and the masque in 'The Tempest' as fruitful in suggestion as Raffaelle's arabesques. We shall learn that the true principles of proportion and harmony, on which professors dilate and over which academies wrangle, are illustrated in the just and artful balance of the tragic and comic elements which Shakespeare is now acknowledged to have everywhere observed. * Coleridge, Table Talk.' Vol. 142.-No. 284. 2 K ART. ART. VII.-Parliamentary Papers on Turkey. 1875-6. RES ESERVING for our concluding article the examination of the conduct of the Ministry and the chiefs of the Opposition in reference to the Eastern Question, we propose in the following remarks to consider, by such light as History affords us, what has led to the existing condition of Turkey, and why at the present moment her fate and fortunes are of such importance to the peace of Europe. Such a preliminary inquiry will, we trust, enable our readers to understand more fully, and to appreciate more correctly the difficulties of the present situation. There is a curious passage just preceding the magnificent peroration to Raleigh's History of the World,' in which he summarises his own views of the state of Europe as it appeared to him more than two and a half centuries ago. He speaks of the Turks and Spaniards as the two Powers most threatening to the independence of Europe, the one seeking to root out the Christian Religion altogether, the other the truth and sincere profession thereof; the one to joyne all Europe to Asia, the other the rest of all Europe to Spaine.' These were the deliberate opinions of one of the most accomplished and most far-seeing of the soldier-statesmen of Elizabeth's age, and his views were shared by the most practical and sagacious politicians of his time. Europe no longer dreads being subjugated by Turk and Spaniard, yet still the fate and fortunes of Turkey are matters of absorbing interest to European statesmen. The Ottoman Turks appeared towards the close of the thirteenth century as conquerors in Asia Minor; whence they crossed to Thrace, and took Adrianople in 1361. It was nearly a century later (1453) that Constantinople was taken by Mahomed II. Another century was occupied in completing the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula and the Morea, of Egypt, Syria, and North Africa; and the empire had attained its greatest dimensions in the time of Solyman the Magnificent-a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth. The Turks had then overrun the greater part of Hungary and the Lower Danubian Provinces, with much of Poland and South Russia; their fleet was by far the most powerful in the world, their artillery heavier and better served than that of any other army, and they were probably never more formidable than in Raleigh's youthful days; the battle of Lepanto (1571) marking the turn of the tide as the first of * History of the World,' chap. vi. § 12, pp. 668-9, ed. 1614. the the serious reverses which, with little intermission, have indicated the gradual decay of Turkish power throughout the last two centuries up to the present day. Conquests from the Venetians in the seventeenth century were more than counterbalanced by the victories of Sobieski before Vienna. Later on, the victories of Prince Eugene secured Hungary, Transylvania, and Sclavonia to the Austrians, and large provinces to the Russians, Poles, and Venetians. The eighteenth century a period of continued disaster to the Turks. In their wars with Austria and Russia they maintained, indeed, their character for courage and endurance, but the final result was uniformly disastrous, and had not the outburst of the French Revolution diverted the attention of Europe to more pressing dangers, it is probable that the Turkish empire in Europe would hardly have lasted to the present day. The Turks were, in fact, up to the end of the last century, among the newest of the European dynasties. They have never taken any real root in Europe. When the French Revolution broke out they were anxious to remain neutral in the great European contest. Hobhouse, in his Letters on Albania,' graphically describes the Sultan's position as spectator of a contest between Russia and England, on the one hand, against France, on the other-a contest of which the Sultan himself 'was the unwilling umpire, the ostensible object, and the proposed prey. The victory of either party alike menaced him with ruin. He had to choose between the armies of France and the fleets of England . . . both to all appearance able to destroy, but neither capable of protecting him against his antagonist." From this period may be said to date the present position of Turkey in the family of European nations. For nearly four centuries from their first appearance in Europe to their wars with Catherine of Russia the Turks had been the common enemies of all Europe and Christendom, and as Europe and Christendom gained strength, so the Turkish power waned. But with the French Revolution came the necessity to Austria, Russia, and England, of securing the co-operation, or, at least, the neutrality, of the Turks; and since that period Turkey has remained supported against the aggressions of any one of her neighbours by the jealousy of other surrounding Powers, propped up when seemingly most lifeless by the opposing pressure of states around her. From the French Revolutionary War also dates the active interest of England in Turkish affairs. Since Elizabeth's first treaty Hobhouse's Letters on Albania,' vol. ii. p. 289, new ed. with with the Turks (1579), eight years after the battle of Lepanto, the trade of the Levant had always been an important branch of British commerce; but it was not until the great Revolutionary War that our interests in India convinced us of the necessity of a postal route more direct and secure than even our supremacy at sea could ensure to us on the voyage round the Cape. Hence the postal line viâ Constantinople and Bagdad, which has continued up to the present day. Hence, too, our ever-increasing interest in Egypt. To the exigencies of the Revolutionary War may also be attributed, not the first, but the most sanguinary of the military insurrections which have occurred in consequence of attempts to introduce European improvements and discipline into the Turkish military and naval establishments. The insurrection of 1807 led to the death of Selim and the postponement of the meditated reforms. The campaigns of 1811 and 1812 followed, and the Turks would probably have been then driven from Europe, had not the French invasion of Russia induced the latter Power to make a peace, which, though it secured Bessarabia and part of Moldavia to Russia, gave a brief breathing-time to the exhausted Turkish empire. Sultan Mahmud took advantage of the peace to consolidate his distracted empire, and to carry out the reforms which had cost Selim his life. But the Greek insurrection in 1821 ended after eight years in the emancipation of Greece; and though the janissaries were at last crushed, and a disciplined army substituted for them, the war with Russia, which broke out in 1828 and ended in the peace of Adrianople, was disastrous to the Turks; and when Mehmed Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, turned his arms against his Sovereign, the intervention of Russia, Austria, and England alone saved the Sultan from utter defeat by his victorious vassal. What might have happened had another and more vigorous dynasty been then substituted for that of Osman may be matter of interesting speculation; but for a time the intervention of the Christian Powers deferred the change. More recent events are within living memory. Symptoms of real progress, such as the formal admission of Christians to office in 1849, alternate in Turkish History with provincial rebellions and discontent up to the Crimean War (1853-56), into the causes real and ostensible of which we must not now diverge. Our present concern is only with its results; and, looking back twenty years, we can now see how disastrous these were to the Turks. Turkey gained, it is true, time and territory, military repute, assurance of a long respite from external aggression, sincere sympathy, as well as European |