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Leighton, might have been painted by the most humble and simple and natural of artists-with this proviso only, that the painter was possessed of genius as high as the picture is admirable. In style, it is one of the very choicest works in the whole Academy, and abundantly proves what still is within Mr Leighton's reach, if haply it yet remain possible for him to retrace his steps.

Of all poems, the Idylls of the King are this year the most prolific in pictures, and above all heroines Elaine ranks as the most favoured. Several painters have attempted to translate into beauteous forms and glowing colours that most pictorial of descriptions, the chariot bier, borne to that stream whereon the barge palled in blackest samite lay. These are the poet's words :

"So those two brethren from the chariot took.

And on the black decks laid in her bed,
Elaine,

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Mr Wallis's picture is scarcely inferior to the verse in the sweet feast of beauty, and for luxury of poetic sadness. It is perhaps too decorative in treatment to be very intense too much decked out in resplendent 'detail to be deeply desolating. In this it is inferior to the artist's prior, and perhaps greater work, "The Death of Chatterton." Mr Wallis plays prettily with his subject, as Mr Millais did with the Drowning of poor Ophelia. The littleness of this manner has been proved incompatible with the greatness of a master-passion.

The historic is grand, the psuedohistoric contemptible. There are at least two painters in the Academy who cannot claim the distinction

due to the former clause in the alternative. It is melancholy to mark the virtuous efforts made from year to year by Mr Hart to redeem the English school from the stigma of extinct ambition. It were unkind to enter into any detailed criticism of his present work, conceived in the very spirit of the sublime, "St Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary, canonised for her goodness, distributing alms to the poor." It is a performance which has the privilege of claiming all the immunities usually extended towards the best intentions. In the same way, it seems ungenerous to censure any picture so well meant as Mr Le Jeune's "Sisters of Lazarus;" but we must confess, speaking generally, that we prefer goodness when it is not quite as weak as water, emotion when it is not hardened into anything just as immovable as stone, and high art when it is permitted to stop somewhat short of the barber's block.

Mr

Approaching the line of legitimate history, there are, at the outset, a few minor works which call for a word of commendation. Elmore is a painter whose pictures have won for him thoughtful admirers. A lull has this year come over his somewhat fitful genius, and his figure of "Marie Antoinette in the Temple," follows but as a minor episode to his grand composition from the Tuileries of last Academy. Mr Cope in like manner, upon a small scale, paints a well-beaten topic of pictorial pathos, "The Parting of Lord and Lady Russell." One of the most thoughtful, and among the most remarkable, pictures of the season, is Mr Dyce's "George Herbert at Bemerton," his country parsonage in Wilts. Mr Dyce's paintings of last year, "St John leading Home his adopted Mother," "The Man of Sorrows," and "Pegwell Bay," without any false pretence or striving, found poems in nature, sermons in stones, and good in everything. George Herbert," though widely different, is a picture painted with the same high purpose. The

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And the picture is painted in this same tone of pensive sober melancholy. George Herbert, with companion-book in hand, turns the upward gazing eye of contemplation on the ivy-mantled tree; a lute leans against a secluded seat, a boat lies upon the bank, the river, shadowed by overhanging branches, steals gently along, and the distant church spire, at the meeting of earth and sky, closes the solemn pastoral, "so calm, so cool, so bright." The picture is painted with a detail seldom found compatible with unity of purpose or depth of expression. Mr Dyce succeeds where others have failed, simply by observing an obvious law common to all the artsthat in descriptive pictures as in descriptive poetry, every touch and word and incident must be relevant to the paramount intent. The amount of detail which the painter has thus found it possible to subordinate to the general effect, is truly marvellous. And such is the accuracy of even the minutest branch, that the picture might serve Mr Ruskin as a diagram for his fifth volume, or his future lectures on tree-twigs."

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There is no chapter in Macaulay's History of greater brilliancy than that which narrates the death of Charles II. "His palace had seldom presented a gayer or a more scandalous appearance than on the evening of Sunday the 1st of February 1685." "The great gallery of Whitehall, an admirable relic of the magnificence of the Tudors, was crowded with revellers and gamblers. The King sat there chatting and toying with three women, whose charms were the boast, and whose vices were the disgrace, of the three nations." "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay - tree. Yet

he passed away, and lo he was not." On the morning of Monday the 2d of February Charles rose from his bed, his utterance indistinct, and his thoughts wandering. On the morning of Thursday following he was better and out of danger; but in the same evening a relapse ensues, and the physicians have already given up all further hope. The bishops and dignities of the Established Church thought it was now time to speak out, and brought to the bedside a table with the sacramental bread and wine, but in vain. Charles refused to receive the Eucharist. The Duchess of Portsmouth, it appears, was in the secret-knew that the King was a Catholic at heart. His brother James, thinking only of personal safety, is appealed to. "A soul is at stake." The Duke starts as if roused from sleep-declares that nothing shall prevent him from discharging the sacred duty which had been delayed too long. He clears the chamber of the Protestant clergymen, commands the crowd to stand aloof, goes to the bed, whispers to the dying King, "Shall I bring a priest?" "Do, brother!" replied the sick man, "for God's sake do! Lose no time." "The King," we are told, "found so much difficulty in swallowing the bread, that it was necessary to open the door and to procure a glass of water." "The whole ceremony had occupied about threequarters of an hour; and, during that time, the courtiers who had filled the outer room had communicated their suspicions to each other by whispers and significant glances." Mr Ward has thrown these thrilling and dramatic incidents into a picture remarkable for vigour, and prodigal in resource. The hand from the death-chamber reaches for the glass of water, to the relief of the choking King. In the ante-room of rich carved wainscoting, capitally painted, is a gay medley of age, youth, fashion, and beauty: bishops and lapdogs, with mistresses patched on cheeks, and convulsed in tears

groups on the other side wiling away tedium by cards-all flaunt

ing and frivolous in the glitter of rings, ribbons, necklaces, and bracelets, the pomp of a wicked world, and the vanity of vain ambition. Thus does Mr Ward, with much strength of manner, point a moral, and paint a picture of keen Hogarth character. The subject, however, is un embarras de richesses, and the work is consequently somewhat distracted and scattered in its profusion of detail and incident, all emphasised with equal force through

out.

We reserve for the last, the most impressive picture of the year, Mr Faed's cottage deathbed-"From Dawn to Sunset," "so runs the round of life from hour to hour." It is a little remarkable that the two leading paintings of the Exhibition should take deathbeds as their subjects the death of a king and the death of a peasant; and that, by each painter alike, the death - agony should be withdrawn from public gaze; in each picture death telling its dread tragedy by a single solitary hand thrust among the livingthe hand taking the glass to the dying king, and the hand of the dying woman seen on the coverlit. Here, however, the analogies end and the contrasts begin. The king breathes his last amid frivolous pageantry-the cottager dies in the quiet of a simple cabin. The humbler picture is more impressive, because everything is in keeping; all in solemn suspense on coming death; truthful, and therefore touching; detailed in all the circumstance of ebbing life, watched with solicitude, and death awaited with fortitude. In gazing upon this great and earnest work, not unmoved, we knew no better words wherewith to express its desolation, and yet to portray the serenity of its hope, than the lines of Mrs Southey, written on a like theme

"Tread softly-bow the head--
In reverent silence bow-
No passing bell doth toll-
Yet an immortal soul
Is passing now.

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It will scarcely be right to close this article on the London art-season without bestowing some commendation on the important additions and improvements effected in the National Gallery of old masters. Increased space has been gained; and the pictures, arranged with singular taste and judgment by Mr Wornum, now constitute a gallery which will stand comparison with the famed museums of the continent,-a gallery which, by judicious purchases, is each day growing more worthy of this great country, more fitted to instruct our artists in the history and development of ancient art, and to teach, by the force of illustrious examples, those principles on the observance of which true excellence must ever depend. The public opening of the present magnificent assembly of pictures was a triumph for the management of our National Museum, and served indeed as a final refutation of those ignorant charges and virulent attacks which at one time bore sway in the public journals and before the House of Commons. The old masters and the English modern pictures are at this moment once more close neighbours; and the passage from the National Gallery to the Royal Academy is striking and instructive. The old masters are dark and low in tone; the modern light in key and even crude. The old are often far removed from present sympathies, belonging essentially to the past; the modern seize upon the topics of the day, and an Academy Exhibition thus often becomes, as it were, an annual register for the year. The old masters require some previous knowledge, perhaps even a special culture, for their full appreciation: a modern English picture, on the other hand, is generally easily understood; its excellences lie more on the surface;

it utters the very thoughts which for the moment are moving in the popular mind. It is by such a comparison as the National Gallery now affords, that we can bring our English school to the test of history, and determine how far our English artists work upon those enduring principles which have been handed down by ages, and come with the sanction of an ancient wisdom. Some modern painters have presumed to scoff at the works and the practices of their great forerunners; but we tell these men plainly that, unless they build upon the experience of the past, unless they take the path trodden by the great artists of the olden times, their popularity will barely outlive the tenure of their lives; and, owing nought to ancestry, they can expect to claim nothing of posterity.

Our artists in the coming year will have to submit to another competition-not with the works of an ancient period, but with the schools of neighbouring nations. It will then be seen that our English painters have never been surpassed in works of pleasing pretty incident: scenes taken from our homes and homesteads; peasants in their humble cots, such as Wilkie loved to paint; or groups well dressed in drawing-rooms, such as Goldsmith

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made to smile, or Sheridan stung with satire. It will then be proved, moreover, that our English artists have never been excelled upon flood or field, when Wilson, Gainsborough, Turner, and Stanfield essayed to paint our British mountains, lakes, and rivers, and with bold sweep of hand held the empire of the seas. It will be found, we say, in the great International Exhibition of 1862, that the British School of Painting is, at least in these directions, unrivalled. But then, likewise, in the words of Reynolds, it will also be discovered that the value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed on it, or the mental pleasure produced by it." Thus will be demonstrated the essential littleness of a small idea, the comparative worthlessness of those partial modes which command but passing popularity. Then it will be found that pictures which aspire to nothing higher than "the furnishing apartments with elegance" must take a low position in the great competition of thought and civilisation. And, before the assembled nations, honour will at last await those works of study and of genius that rest on truths which change not with the lapse of time, nor swerve to altered place.

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MAD DOGS.

EVERY one knows that dogs are liable to a terrible disease, which can be communicated to other animals and to man: a disease frightful in its symptoms, and fatal in its effects. But very few persons know what are the signs and symptoms

of this disease; and since cure is impossible, prevention becomes tenfold more important. We propose, therefore, to treat this subject with the minuteness which its importance warrants.

1.-VULGAR ERRORS.

Under this head it will be necessary to include almost every single notion which is popularly held about mad dogs; for it is surprising that on a subject of this fatal interest the current ideas are not simply inaccurate: they are utterly and dangerously wrong. To begin with the one expressed in the name Hydrophobia, which means horror at water. This is not simply a misnomer, otherwise we should scarcely mention it, but a misdescription of a very serious kind. The name hydrophobia having been fixed in people's minds, and the idea that rabid dogs dread water having become part and parcel of the general belief, the sight of a dog eagerly lapping water, or willingly plunging into it, would naturally lead ninety-nine out of a hundred to exclaim" He drinks, therefore there can't be danger." The fact is, that a burning thirst is one of the characteristic symptoms of rabies, in its early stages. True it is, and very curious it is, that in man an indefinable dread of water, or any other liquid, does characterise the later stages of the disease; and for the disease in man the name of hydrophobia is not inappropriate. Of this we shall see examples presently. But in dogs, so far from a dread of water being a reliable symptom, it is a symptom which

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does not show itself more than once in fifty cases. "Il est désormais acquis à la science," says the latest authority on this subject, que c'est précisément un signe de la rage, lorsque la soif est trop ardente; et que jamais appellation plus fausse, plus absurde, et en même temps plus dangeureuse, ne fut appliquée à aucune maladie que celle de hydrophobie à la rage du chien."*

Another popular error attributes the madness of dogs to the heat of the "dog-days." In July and August all kinds of precautions are taken, which no one thinks of for a moment in November and December. On the Continent, a paternal police is minutely solicitous in summer about the enforcement of its regulations. But the simple fact is, that the "dog-days" have no more to do with the rabies than the moon has to do with lunacy. Dogs are liable to attacks in every month of the year; but it so happens that July and August are precisely the months in which the fewest cases occur. Against the loose estimate of popular opinion, we can place the exact records of the veterinary schools of Alfort, Toulouse, and Lyons, and these show that it is not in the hottest months, but in the wettest months, that the great majority of cases are seen. In April, November, and

*SANSON: Le Meilleur Préservatif contre la Rage: Etude de la Physiognomie des Chiens et des Chats Enragés. 1860.

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