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for his mistresses. And in due time he finds he is impoverished; not destitute, indeed, nor living meanly, but shorn of many of his delights. He is advised to marry, and there is found for him the daughter of an eminent physician - Maria Ruthven is her name. With her, in 1640, he goes to Flanders and to France, hoping that Louis Treize will employ him in the decoration of the Louvre, and stirred probably by the ambition to do higher work than portrait-painting. But Nicolas Poussin is engaged before Vandyke puts in his claim, and Vandyke must return to England, though English air, in the world of politics and fashion, is thick with a coming trouble. Sir Anthony is ill-ill and unhopeful; and though the king is so far interested in the court-painter as to offer naïvely, a gratuity of three hundred pounds to the physician who can save his life, neither royal interest nor medical skill is of any long avail, and Sir Anthony dies on the 9th day of December, 1641, the day of the baptism of his newlyborn child. That child Maria Ruthven's is not his only child; for in the will made but a few days before his death there is pathetic mention of "my daughter beyond sea:" and one can fancy that with that wife beside him whom friends had persuaded him to marry, so that his life might be quieter, he, "weake of body, yet enjoying his senses, memorie, and understandinge," thinks somewhat of the long past pleasure days, the bright beginning in contrast with this end.

Mr. W. H. Carpenter, who has catalogued his etchings, assigns to him but twenty-four. No less than twenty of these are portraits of men. But Mr. Carpenter "does not feel justified in omitting thirteen other etchings, chiefly of sacred and allegorical subjects." With these, in this paper, we have nothing to do.

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The practical etcher will praise Vandyke for the frankness and simplicity of his work; for an economy of labor which up to a given point shows only as artistic excellence, and is the proof of knowledge and power. Yet again, it is carried sometimes too near to meagreness, and the praise needs must stop. Does the artist, on the other hand, seek to avail himself to the full of the resources of his art? - then some fault of conception or execution which slighter work would have left to be unnoticed, or would not even have carried with it at all, is very plainly apparent. A sky is hard and wooden; a background is artificial. Where is the tonality which would have been given by the more complete master? On the whole, then, it is possible that Vandyke is best when he sketches. The lines of the figure, the lines of the face, this and that trait of character, generally true, yet generally not far below the surface, all this Vandyke can render rapidly and readily; a clear thought, not a profound one, expressed with an accurate hand. Here is a cloak set as gracefully as Mr. Irving's in the play. Here is a bearing as manly, but it is more the manner than the man. Here, too, is a suggestion of a collar of lace. How well that lies on the broad shoulders! Sometimes the mind is seized as well as the raiment. The portrait of Snellinx has infinite rough vigor. This man was a painter of battles there is battle in his eye and in his firm right hand. Will you see a contented countenance; a mind at rest, with no thought of a pose; a graceful head, with long and black disordered hair; a calm intelligence in eyes and mouth? Look, then, at Paul Pontius, the Antwerp engraver. He is a worthy gallant, standing there, with visible firm throat, stout arm, and dexterous hand. The collar's lace-work makes the firm throat yet more massive by its contrast: the manyfolded garment hides nothing of the plain line of that rounded, stalwart arm. There is no date engraved upon the plate, and none is positively known for the man's birth or death; but on an early impression in the Museum Print Room I see written by a German hand, "Paulus Pontius, geboren 1603," and one takes the portrait to be that of a man close upon seven-and-twenty.

It was

1 One of these-Margaret Lemon-appears, says an authority," to have been a woman of much notoriety." There are prints after one of the portraits which Vandyke painted of her, by Hollar, Gaywood, Lommelin, and Morin.

etched, therefore, in the prime of Vandyke, in 1630, or thereabouts, a year or two before he settled in England. For pure etching, nothing is finer or more spirited than the print of Antonius Cornelissen, the burly, middle-aged, and rich "collector." And yet one turns away from all with no other impression than that which was formed almost at the beginning. Surely, one says, in the company of artists Vandyke is motioned to too great a place. Technical qualities apart, the value of his work as an etcher is precisely that of his work as a painter. There is the same mind in it—that, and no more; a mind courtier-like, refined, chivalrous, observant, thoughtful at intervals; yet not of the highest at any point; neither the noblest nor the keenest, nor even near to these. Deducting here and there a great exception-such as that grave and gracious Sir Kenelm Digby, in the billiard-room at Knole-his subjects, as he has represented them, are not free from the suspicion of "posing." There is little intensity in his artistic temperament; little real appreciation of beauty, or of the truest force. A touch of affectation has no repugnance for him. His works in the main seem wanting in the unerring directness, the unerring strength, of a great man's message sent forth from mind to mind.

II.

Roughly speaking, all our great etchers were contemporaries; and while Vandyke was a child, there was born, at Lübeck, Adrian van Ostade. Particulars of his life are not abundant, and if we may judge both from that little which has descended to us of his story and from the cold and cynical observant face which makes the frontispiece to his collection of etchings, they would not bear with them any dramatic interest. His life is in his work, and his work is great in quantity and in such qualities as are technical. He came, when very young, to Haerlem, to study under Franz Hals, was the fellow pupil and intimate friend of Brauwer, and in the city of his adoption he soon found ample and remunerative labor. passed on, his success and reputation became more general and distinguished, and it is not likely that he would ever have quitted Haerlem, bad not difficult times loomed in sight.

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Alarmed at the approach of French troops, in 1662, he prepares to leave Holland and return to his own land. He sells his pictures and effects with this intention, and gets as far as Amsterdam, whence he will embark for Lubeck. But in Amsterdam he is well received - his fame has gone before him and an amateur called Constantine Senneport prevails on him to be his guest. The new friend explains to Ostade the advantages of remaining in a town so great and rich; and Ostade, with whom love of country held, we may be sure, a very secondary place when love of money had any need to clash with it, is soon persuaded to stay. In Amsterdam, therefore, his easel is set up; his works are purchased with avidity; they are ordered even more promptly than with all his perseverance they can be executed; and with increasing celebrity Ostade pursues his labor until old age is well upon him. He dies in Amsterdam in 1685, aged seventyfive, leaving, in addition to some three hundred highlyfinished pictures, many drawings which were done, it is believed, as much for pleasure as for studies of his more arduous works, and fifty etchings in which most of the characteristics of his paintings are reproduced with a dexterity, a mastery of manner, which, whatever be the change of fashion and of culture, will insure for him high rank, as one among the few great etchers.

An accomplished and often sympathetic critic, who has made of etching his particular study, has been unusually severe upon the work of Ostade: not, of course, upon its technical merits-respecting which severity itself must give way to admiration but upon the sentiment that it expresses by touches so direct, keen, unmistakable. Composition and chiar oscuro, perfect as the subjects selected can possibly give scope for these two great quali

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ties Mr. Hamerton allows in Ostade's work. But the sentiment he finds wholly repulsive: repulsive from end to end. The condemnation, though true enough in the main, need I reis certainly a little too sweeping. It is true. peat? of much of his work of much even of that which is technically the best. In the "Tavern Dance" and in "Rustic Courtship," "the males pursue the females;" while in "The Family," "the female gives suck to her And yet a sentiment quite other young." It is all animal. than this is now and again conveyed; and in enumerating these pieces, one should not forget those others — how, for instance, in "The Painter " the calm pursuit of labor for labor's sake is well expressed; how in "The Spectacle Seller "a rustic or suburban incident is depicted with point and simplicity. There is nothing animal in “The KnifeGrinder;" it is a little bourgeois scene of no elevation, but In the "Peasant Family sayof easily-recognized truth. ing Grace" there is even a little spirituality, a homely but genuine piety; though the types are poor, with no natural dignity- the father as unintelligent and sheep-like a parent as ever fostered his young, and accepted without "the struggle or questioning a life of the dullest monotony. Again, in the "Peasant paying his Reckoning,' finest and most fascinating, I should say, of Ostade's smaller plates, it is not the dull bliss of boozing that is primarily thought of, dwelt upon, or presented, but rather paying peasant who the whole scene of this interiorfumbles for the coin, and watchful hostess, and still abiding guests. How good is the space: how good the accesIt is a tavern insories! the leisure, how delightful! deed, but somehow glorified by art. For accurate delicacy of perception, for dexterous delicacy of execution, what is there that surpasses this?

But do you, on the other hand, wish to see work which shall abundantly confirm Mr. Hamerton's opinion of Ostade already partly justified, as I have indicated, by "The Family,' ,""Rustic Courtship," and "The Tavern Dance," then you will turn to the pieces numbered 13 and 50 in the catalogue of Bartsch. The first of these is called "The Smokers:" it represents three men, one of whom sits upon a turned-up cask. Chiar-oscuro is good, and grouping is good: and that is all. There is as little subject for the mind as beauty for the eye; there is nothing of the charThe acter with which Meissonier endows such a scene. second represents an interior with many peasants, of whom some are children and the rest of mature years. They are all delighting in and commending to each other this drink and that this and that savory mouthful that fitly crowns with sensual jollity the labor of the day.

Take Adrian van Ostade out of doors, and he is a little better. In open air, somehow, he is less grossly animal. Not that in presence of a wide landscape and far-reaching vista there is any hopefulness in him. His own vista is bounded as before. It is not the landscape that he sees with his mind, but the near pursuit of the peasaut by the roadside, the peasant by the bridge. In "The Fishers," Iwo boys, with old men's faces, bend over the bridge's railings, and over them hangs a gray Dutch sky, monotonous A wide landscape says nothing and dreary as their lives. to Ostade. It is too great for him; he is never concerned with the infinite in any way. But just outside the cottage door, on the bench, within easy reach of ale-house tap, he and his work are happiest and best. Here is evoked >uch sense of beauty as he is dowered with by Nature, which is never profuse to him-such sense of beauty as the conditions of his Netherlands life have enabled him to keep and cultivate.

Thus, in "La Fête sous la Treille," we have some charm of open-air life, much movement, some vivacity, and here and there a gleam of grace. In the group of "The Charlatan" there is some dramatic interest, and there are characters more varied than he is wont to present. But as we have seen him in his interiors sprawling brush and pot to the picturesqueness of litter so let us take and saucer, and strewn cards upon the floorleave of him in recognizing that he was alive also to the

1 How this spiritually struck the refined mind of Goethe may be seen in Goethe and Mendelssohn, ¿d Edition, p. 70.

picturesqueness of nature, when that was shown in little
things of quite familiar appearance, and alive too, now and
The last
again, to such picturesqueness as men can make.
he proves by the care and thought and delicacy he bestows
on the often prominent quaint lines of diamond-patterned
casements; and the first, by the lightness and sensitiveness
of his touch when he draws the leaf and tendril of the vine
by the house-wall, as it throws its slight cool shadow on the
rustic bench, or curls waywardly into the now open win-
dow, through which there glances for a moment (brief in-
deed in Ostade's life!) a little of the happy sunshine of
De Hooghe.

HOW URI CHOSE HER CHIEF MAGISTRATE.

LAST month the solemn day came round when the ancient Republic of Uri, one of the oldest and most historic of the Swiss cantons, had to elect her chief executive official, the Landamman. Uri is essentially Catholic. Her They shared in the exaltation of the Cantonalist party over people were active on the side of the Sonderbund in 1847. the Centralists when the latter made their first attempt to rob the cantons of their hereditary privileges under color of revising the Federal Constitution in 1872; and they were proportionally depressed when these traitors to Swiss traditions triumphed under the influence of Protestant and Fo-called Liberal principles at the poll on the 19th of April. Consequently a heavy gloom set on the faces of the fathers the altered circumstances which would make the new Lanof the country when they met to elect their own ruler under damman, according to popular view in the canton, a mere agent of the distant Government of Berne, instead of the chief magistrate of a free people. Herr Epp, whose term of office had come legally to a close, as it had indeed each "I May for many years before, was the first to speak. have not the smallest desire to be reëlected," was the burden of his address; “and I beg earnestly that my wish on I have had very little satthis head may be attended to. isfaction in exercising my charge; and my successor is We are about to lose our own Constilikely to have still less, for in these evil days it is anything but a pleasant one. tution, and have it replaced by Federal institutions. I would not therefore hold the position in which you placed me any longer. There will be plenty of taxes by and by; and in short the lookout is in every way not an agreeable one. I am not the man to fulfil the functions of Landamman under these new conditions; and in no case will I accept them, having had quite enough of the duty, and being thoroughly tired of it. If I drink a quiet glass with an old friend from the country, I find myself made a picture of in a caricature by some of the Liberals. I have no relish for this sort of thing, and wish to go back to private life and be able to share my glass with an acquaintance without observation. So I have now only to thank you all for your support, and suggest that you should elect Herr Lusser to fill the post."

Herr Lusser had acted as Vice-President of the Republic for some time past; but his unwillingness to fill the higher office seemed at first scarcely less remarkable than Herr Epp's desire to quit it. "I have already," he said, "been thirty years in the service of the canton in various capacitle pay. I am most unwilling to take on myself the heavities, in most of which there was plenty to do and very litest duty of all. Besides which, you forget that I am really too old. I have already passed my fifty-fifth birthday, and need rest." Cries here came from the assembly of " (sixty being the proper are not yet sixty, Herr Lusser "I cannot," went age for exemption from public duties). on the speaker, disregarding these comments, "get through And then the Landamman my day now without a nap. will have a very hard nut to crack, and my teeth are really not strong enough for such a job. I had very much rather you would elect our worthy standard-b arer, Herr Arnold."

You

Herr Arnold, called on to speak by this personal allusion,

proved himself a man of very few words. "Fellow-citizens," he said, "please to look on that remark of Herr Lusser's as a mere matter of politeness. We are all agreed that he is the proper man to succeed Herr Epp. He is exactly fit for the duty; for he not only knows our cantonal laws, but is well up in Federal legislation. As for me, I declare to you, on my word of honor, I will not accept the post, and in this you will find me firm."

No more discussion followed this very decided declaration.

An almost unanimous vote taken on the instant de

clared Herr Lusser duly elected Landamman; and, quitting his place in the outside ring, the new magistrate took his position in the centre of the circle formed by his fellowcitizens, as the official sign that he would no longer oppose their will. "Your confidence," he said, addressing them, "touches my very heart, and I will do my best for you, with God's help. I thought the worst pang of my life was when I lately buried my worthy mother; but I declare it did not give me more pain than stepping forward into this position. However, I will fill my post without favor or prejudice. These are evil times for him who is the protector of the widows and orphans of the canton, for the public chest is well-nigh empty, and the demands on it are large. We hope much from that 'hole of the future,' as they call it, which is being bored through St. Gothard; but we see nothing yet but a cloud of Italian and Suabian immigrants coming into the canton to ruin our morals and take our business from us. Though we voted No' the other day, we have got to live in the new house they have fitted on us. But then the Holy Father is a prisoner in his own, and so we have no business to complain. After all, we are not so taxed as our neighbors over the mountains by their Galantuomo; nor are our ecclesiastics so persecuted as those of Germany by that man who has already crushed poor France and is now imprisoning the bishops. But you may depend upon it, the church will outlive him. As for me, I am but a weak mortal; but I will do my best, and now only beg your prayers and help." This exordium finished, the new Landamman took the oath of office, and Uri fairly entered on the first year of the Lusser administration.

FOREIGN NOTES.

THE Fifth or "Inkerman" volume, as it is called, of Mr. Kinglake's "Invasion of the Crimea," is announced for immediate publication.

IT is announced that a school of music is to be established by order of the Imperial German government at Düsseldorf in connection with the local school of painting.

MEISSONIER'S "Sign Painter," painted some seven years ago, was recently sold in London, for £4500. Another picture by the same artist, "The Guardsman," sold at the same time for £4100.

Long Ago is to be discontinued. The editor has the satisfaction of knowing that during the brief existence of his paper, it went back, financially at least, more energetically

than its rival Notes and Queries.

MR. BROWNING's forthcoming work will, it is said, consist of a translation of the "Hercules Furens" of Euripides, in an original setting, somewhat like that which "Balaustion's Adventure" forms for the Alcestis.

THE Concerts which Anton Rubinstein gave last month in St. Petersburg and Moscow-two in each city - yielded the enormous sum of 23,000 roubles silver. One of each of the two concerts was for a charitable object.

IT is stated that the latest result of the excavations at Rome is the discovery of a magnificent bust of Matidia, niece of Trajan, and mother of Sabina, wife of Hadrian, which is in a perfect state of preservation, and is to be placed in the museum of the Campidoglio palace.

THE great work on Michael Angelo, which is promised for his fourth centenary, in March, 1875, and which, it is said, will contain 700 letters of the great artist. besides more than 1000 letters and writings of various kinds by his contemporaries, will be published, it is said, simultaneously in three languages - Italian, German, and French.

PROFESSOR HEIM has described a small cave recently discovered near the railway-station of Thäingen, in Swit zerland, containing abundance of animal bones, with un

polished flint implements and other relics of human workmanship, including an incised figure of a reindeer on horn. In the lower layers of the deposit were found remains of the mammoth.

A CURIOUS discovery has just been made in Italy by a young musician, who has arrived in Paris with his prize. It is an unpublished score by Cimarosa, entitled "Margharita di Vicenza." It was in a Carmelite convent at Florence that the finder hit on it one day in turning over some old papers. He obtained the manuscript without any difficulty, and has presented it to the Paris Conservatoire.

THE Prussian Staatsanzeiger states that Professor Max Müller has been elected a knight of the Ordre pour le Mérite, at the same time as Field-Marshal Count Moltke. This is the highest distinction in Germany. The number of knights is restricted to thirty, and when a vacancy occurs, a new member is elected by the chapter, and the election confirmed by the emperor. There are also some foreign knights who enjoy the privilege of being allowed to wear their insignia at the courts of England, France. and Italy, without requiring special leave from their sovereigns. Mr. Thomas Carlyle and Mr. Humphrey Lloyd have lately been elected foreign members of the Ordre pour le Mérite.

vre,

A NEW Salle has just been opened in the Louvre for ancient American curiosities. In the glass cases that line the walls is placed a considerable collection of pottery, idols, vases, and other objects, which gives a good idea of the artistic knowledge of the races that inhabited America before its discovery by Columbus. Many of the idols are carved in stone and marble, and resemble in their types the well-known Egyptian divinities. The most remarkable object of the collection is an immense zodiac of about twelve mètres in circumference, cut in a kind of black marble, and absolutely covered with grotesque signs and inscriptions. All these treasures, it appears, have been for a long time stowed away in the magazines of the Loubut until the recent stir about the management of that museum no one seems to have thought of exhibiting them. M. FRANÇOIS LENORMANT, the successor to M. Beulé, late Archæological Professor at the. Collège de France, has written to the Temps on the subject of Dr. Schliemann's excavations. Comparing the antiquities now brought to light with similar objects found in Cyprus, Rhodes, and Santorin, he inclines to think that they cannot be ascribed to a period later than 1600 B. C. They belong, he would fain urge, to an older Troy than that of Homer; more probably to that city which tradition said was built by Phoebus and Poseidon and destroyed by Heracles; or perhas to that still more ancient one founded by Dardanus. There is a strong resemblance between the copper arms of Hissarlik and weapons of the brazen age found in Denmark and the lacustrine dwellings of Switzerland; while the earthen vases sculptured with women's breasts in relief have direct counterparts in some found in Pomerania and on the shores of the Baltic.

This fact corroborates a theory recently advanced by M. Bertrand, the learned keeper of the Saint-Germain Museum, before Dr. Schliemann's doings were heard of, that the civilization of the brazen age had its origin in the north of Asia Minor among the Chalybean metal-workers. From thence, he contends, their manufactures were brought by Eastern merchants along the route followed by the amber traders mentioned by Herodotus, past the Carpathian range, where to this day are found hoards of Greek coins, as far as the shores of the Baltic.

EVERY SATURDAY:

A JOURNAL OF CHOICE READING, PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY, 219 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON:

NEW YORK: HURD AND HOUGHTON;
Cambridge: The Riverside Press.

Single Numbers, 10 cts.; Monthly Parts, 50 ets.; Yearly Subscription, $5.00. N. B. THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY and EVERY SATURDAY sent to one address for $8.00.

COLLEGE IN THE NOVEL.

THE recurrence of Commencement in the various colleges and universities lets loose a large body of collegiate reminiscences. Class gatherings and college festivals give opportunity for excellent speech-making and story-telling; old collegians walk arm in arm, call each other by the old nicknames, and vow there never was such jollity as belonged to their student days. Why is it, we are impelled to ask, that there is almost no good literature whatever, based upon college life in America? A few books have been issued which draw their interest from the picture of college life, yet considering the delight with which men of letters profess to regard their college days, does it not seem strange that no one makes any attempt to reproduce those days in literature? Wensley, one of the pleasantest of American stories, had for its hero — no moral being allowed by the author a rusticated Harvard student; but then the scene of the story and the incidents depended not on his being a student, but a student cut off from his college. Other tales have been written by men shortly after graduation, but they have been of a callow sort.

-

The reason will be found, we suppose, in the limitations of college life. To the student himself, his college life is a momentous affair. He finds himself one of a small company that is hedged in by a peculiar set of circumstances, laws, manners, and traditions. A boy before entering, he is suddenly talking about the men of his class; he joins formal societies, helps to make laws, becomes sometimes a revolutionary character, for a very short period usually, becomes a member of an order, is conscious, in fine, of an isolation from the common conditions of other people. So fixed is this consciousness that some have even regarded it as a grievance that they should be subject to the laws of the commonwealth or municipality, conceiving their institution to be autonomous, and holding themselves as a privileged class. Their own affairs thus become of great importance to them, and so absorbed are they in their

microcosm that

"They take the rustic murmur of their bourg

For the great wave that circles round the world." The outside world humors this collegiate temper, and the student rarely fails to find a ready listener. As a student he is regarded with that respect which the old always feel toward the young when they are engaged in any really high occupation. As a collegian he is looked upon as a high-spirited, frisky animal, generally, and always interesting by virtue of his abstraction from the common pursuits of the world. Just that which makes the collegian emphasize himself and surroundings, namely, his isolation and semi-monastic life, constitutes the charm which he has for the world outside.

Why, then, we ask again, should not this sentiment find a place in literature and be preserved in a romance or novel? We have already found the answer. When the student goes out into the fuller life of the world of men, and enters into a maturity of feeling and judgment, he

laughs good-naturedly at his old self-importance, and at the magnifying-glass with which he was wont to inspect all the circumstances of his little life; laughing, he would find it hard to treat the details of his college life with the respect for which a novel would call, nor does the romance of those days seem complete enough to him now to warrant being reproduced as the beginning and end of a romance; the end seems so arbitrary that the sentiment, to have its real value in relation to other sentiment, must be treated only as introductory, or as an episode. Thus college life appears in literature in fragment only, for it appears to the writer, afterward, orly as a fragment of a fuller life. The novel or the romance is, in some sense, a complete work, and representative of a complete thought, but the very characteristic of college life is its incompleteness. The graduation day of the young student is

called Commencement.

There is another cause that may be given, of a more external character: College life, while having a general sameness in the different colleges of the country, varies in each case by certain traditions and customs which really give the piquancy to a college story, and as the readers of such books need to be found amongst collegians or those preparing to enter college, it would appear that any book which gave a true picture of college life would give it with local color; and such is the fine sense of college self-consciousness, that no Harvard man would be betrayed into reading a college book which gave Yale life, and a Yale man would find it equally barbarous to read the interior of Harvard life. On the whole, we may safely say that college life is full of delight and excellent promise, but it does not present exclusive material out of which literature may be constructed.

NOTES.

- Mr. Edward H. Knight, who was the compiler of Bryant's "Library of Poetry and Song," has nearly ready -curious pair of works!— an American Mechanical Dictionary, giving descriptive definitions of machines, tools, instruments, and processes in alphabetical order, forming a complete reference-book of information concerning the mechanical appliances of science and the industrial and fine arts. Every instrument named is found to be fully described in its alphabetical place, as, for instance, the 900 terms used in civil and hydraulic engineering, 500 surgical instruments and appliances, 900 terms in mining, metallurgy, and metal-working, and 500 agricultural implements. Mr. Knight is editor of the United States Patent Office Gazette.

The Museum of Fine Arts has just opened, in the Boston Athenæum, an exhibition of its treasures, to which have lately been added the pictures and engravings bequeathed by Mr. Sumner, and some specimens of Limoges painted enamel, "probably the only specimens," says Mr. C. C. Perkins, "of their kind in America, and first-rate examples of the work of Leonard de Limoges, Jean Courtois, and Nardon Pénicaud, three of the most celebrated masters of the school of Limoges in the sixteenth century."

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rowed from. Among the pictures, may be named Decamp's Turkish Patrol, Church's Petra, Huntington's Clement VII. and Charles V. at Bologna, Gerome's Death of Casar, and Boughton's The Confidantes.

A statue of General Putnam has been erected in the beautiful park at Hartford. It was the gift of the late Joseph P. Allyn, who died in Paris in 1869, and bequeathed $5000 for this purpose. His father, who with C. D. Warner and Governor Jewell were appointed to carry out his wishes, increased the amount by an equal gift, and J. Q. A. Ward was selected as the sculptor. The statue is of bronze, life-size. The hero stands on his right foot, with his left slightly raised, and in the full uniform of a general officer of the Continental army. The face is much idealized, we are told, representing rather the spirit of the Revolutionary time than a strict likeness of General Putnam, although it bears a resemblance to the few sketches extant of him. This reads like nonsense. If there are sketches of his face, why should they not be followed? Suppose the sketches had been made originally with reference to showing the spirit of the time? We wonder if the sculptor who is to make the statue of Mr. Key, for which Mr. Lick has provided, will try to represent the general spirit of the Star Spangled Banner. Perhaps he will unfurl him in some way, and give his mouth an artistic whistling form.

- Mrs. Emily E. Ford, in The Independent, proposes training schools for domestic service, in connection with the Emigrants' Bureaus of the various cities. "We pro

pose," she says, "an emigrant boarding-house for sorting the classes, where they may go first on leaving the ship. Then let there be training-schools in each ward, where they may go when classified. Each servant should pay a small sum for her board until a month of training be past, when work might be accepted as equivalent, if she wished longer schooling. Let cooks, waiters, and chambermaids here learn the rudiments of all household work, and servants out of place might board in these houses. Let there be one large school, under the care say of Professor Blot, where those who were ambitious, diligent, and capable should be taught the higher branches. We have no doubt that graduates of this higher course would be eagerly caught up, as their honesty and capacity would be thoroughly tested."

The will of John Carter Brown of Providence gives Brown University $50,000 for the erection of a fire-proof library building, for which purpose he had previously given a fund, now amounting to $20,000, and a lot of land worth $35,000. It also bequeaths $25,000 to the Rhode Island Hospital; $5000 to the Butler Hospital for the Insane; $5000 to the Redwood Library at Newport. The bulk of his estate goes to his children. Mrs. Brown, Robert H. Ives, Thomas P. I. Goddard, and George W. R. Matteson are named as trustees in the will. It is not said what disposition will be made of his valuable library. It is to be hoped that it will be preserved intact.

- On the Fourth of July there is to be a formal opening of the great bridge at St. Louis. They are to burn an immense amount of powder, and if anything can be set fire to, or blown up, it will have a fair chance. Great pieces of fireworks, we are told, from three hundred to four hundred feet long, will go off. They will contain "designs representing Washington, Missouri, and Illinois, shaking hands, flanked with the coat of arms of each State." We should like ever so much to see that piece. Perhaps Chicago and St. Louis will be represented as shaking hands, too, after the etiquette of the ring.

A valuable letter, which was mailed at New York for Liverpool twenty-two years ago, was returned through the Dead Letter Office to the writer on the 15th of last month. Where it has been all this time is a mystery. It was posted on the 25th of May, 1852, by Antonio Yznagadelvalle, a Spanish merchant of No. 60 Beaver Street, and was addressed “ Alejo Yznaga, care of the United States Consul, Liverpool." A draft on Brown Brothers for £41 14s. 1d., payable to the person addressed, was inclosed. The letter was recently transmitted from Great Britain to Washington, and subsequently remailed to this city, to be returned to the writer. It long detention abroad was not explained. An employee of Mr. Yznagadelvalle called at the post-office to receipt for it. He told Mr. Clarke, the dead letter clerk, that Mr. Yznagadelvalle undoubtedly wrote the letter, but that it was so long ago he did not recol lect it. He said that Mr. Yznaga, the gentleman to whom it had been sent, had been dead six years. The paper

of the letter is yellow with age, and the ink faded and almost illegible. The wonder among the post-office authorities is how it was found. Mr. Clarke says that there are several instances of dead letters being recovered five or six years after they were posted, but he does not remember one that has been twenty-two years in transit. We should think this matter would be worth investigating. It may turn out that the post-office department has been educating somebody to master the names of writer and receiver.

- A left-hand writer in the Scientific American gives some reasons why it is better to write as he does. The hand is never in the way of vision. The pen point is always in plain sight, and so is the paper to be written on. There is, consequently, no inducement to stoop forward or to turn the head so as to throw the eyes out of focus. It is a common fault with those who write much that the left eye has a shorter range than the right. It is overworked and compelled to adapt itself to nearer vision. In writing with the left hand, these evils are avoided. An upright posture is the easiest, and the eyes are equally distant from the paper.

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- The "Faraday," which has just laid the new Atlan tic telegraph line from Halifax to the Isles of Shoals, was built by the company for the express purpose: it is described as 66 an immense craft, looking very old, rusty, and worn for a new ship, and covered, over her decks, with queer-looking top-hamper." It is a commentary on the noble civilization which science is supposed to bring in its wake, that all the business pertaining to the construction of this new telegraph had to be transacted with the utmost secrecy on account of the active hostility of the other submarine telegraph companies. The portion of the line which is to connect Halifax with the Irish coast is yet to be laid, but it is expected that the work will be completed by September.

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Mr. William H. Dall, the well-known naturalist, resumed his Alaskan explorations, under the Coast Survey, about the 20th of April; at which date he expected to sail for Sitka and more northern points. His labors will probably be conducted in the neighborhood of Cook's Inlet, and along the coast of Alaska as far as the Islands of Nunivak and St. Michael's.

"From Four to Fourteen" is the title of a book just published. As there was already a novel entitled "From Fourteen to Fourscore," and as Victor Hugo has given us "Ninety-Three," there is a gap of thirteen years yet to

fill.

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