undoubtedly the greatest of living sonneteers-Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is very unfortunate that disinterested and dispassionate criticism of some of Mr. Rossetti's most characteristic sonnets has been rendered all but impossible by the action of polemical moralists or anti-moralists, who have made them a peg on which to hang a controversy which is neither properly ethical nor properly artistic. When a critic knows that if he expresses admiration for such a sonnet as The Kiss or Nuptial Sleep, he will be denounced as fleshly or perhaps filthy, and that if, on the other hand, he says he dislikes it, he will be held up to the derision of cultured humanity as the insensate Philistine, he will probably hold his tongue, even though he may have something to say which would be worth listening to. The course which is suggested by discretion or cowardice-call it which we will-is, however, the course which at present will probably be most serviceable to true criticism; for happily Mr. Rossetti's work as a whole is too purely artistic to lend itself readily to these irritating pseudo-ethical controversies; and it is upon this whole that final judgment must be pronounced.

Perhaps the most obvious positive characteristic of Mr. Rossetti's poetry is its picturesqueness. He is not merely a painter and a poet, but a painterpoet, which is a different thing. He has too true a sense of the dignity of each separate art, and of the inevitable limitations of each vehicle of expression, to endeavour to paint poems or to write pictures; but his imagination is so concrete that its creations always present themselves to him as things of form and colour, and his sonnets spread themselves out like fair paintings on the walls of the gallery of the mind. Every poet's instinct prompts him to embody thoughts and feelings in sensuous symbols which can be grasped by the imagination; and one of the tests by which we award precedence in the poetic hierarchy is the measure of success with which this embodiment is achieved. In Mr. Rossetti's case it is a large measure: we know of none larger, and his place is among the highest. We will not say that every one of his sonnets would provide a motive for an actual picture: both the form and colour may here and there be too faintly indicated for reproduction by palpable lines and pigments; but the effect upon the mind of any one of them is analogous to that produced by one of his own glowing canvases. There are in both the same restful harmonies, the same solemn splendour, the same sad insatiate yearning, the same bounteousness of beauty; and those of us who have been privileged to behold some of those special drawings or paintings to which certain of the sonnets are avowedly twin children of the master's art, turn from the picture to the poem and from the poem back to the picture, and know not which to choose, because both are so full of all delights.

Mr. Rossetti's imaginative treatment is both spiritual and impassioned, the sensuous and the super-sensuous are inextricably blended, and when love is the theme of his utterances it is a love of which we know not the

body from the soul. There is a noteworthy integrity in his love sonnets

which gives them a peculiar interest and value. No element is wanting, none is unduly preponderant. The poet can sing to the hautboy of the flame-winged Passion of Love, or to the sweet notes of the whitewinged harpist, who is Love's Worship, declaring that

"Through thine hautboy's rapturous tone

Unto my lady still this harp makes moan,
And still she deems the cadence deep and clear."

The first twenty-eight of Mr. Rossetti's sonnets, like the Sonnets from the Portuguese, form a continuous series; but in the former the situations are more varied, and the gradual transition from brightness to gloom, instead of, as in Mrs. Browning's poems, from gloom to brightness, leaves us in an entirely different mood. Mr. Rossetti's genius is, however, essentially sombre in tone; and even one of the earliest sonnets which are the exultant outburst of a victorious love closes with the question of mournful presage :—

manner.

"O love, my love! if I no more should see

Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,

Nor image of thine eyes in any spring

How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death's imperishable wing?"

This sombreness of effect is brought about in a strange and subtle We have spoken of these sonnets as pictures, and in carrying out the comparison one may say that this effect is produced not by the use of dull colours, of browns and greys and faded tints, but rather by a miraculous mingling of rich and gorgeous hues. Mr. Ruskin has somewhere observed that good colour cannot possibly be gay colour, and here the colour is always good, but gay never. Seldom in literature has there been such a combination of splendour and sadness, and both the splendour and the sadness are made all the more impressive by marvellous manipulative art. No poet has ever gained a greater amount of expressional effect by the mere sound quality of words, singly and in combination, than Mr. Rossetti. He has a habit, not sufficiently obtrusive to become a trick, of ending the sestette, and occasionally the octave, with a line containing some one long sonorous word of open vowels and the most producible consonants, with now and then an additional weak syllable, which prolongs the movement and gives a felt weight and solemnity. An example may be found in the lines just quoted, but there are many others:

These, and such lines as these, infringe upon sense and soul like a cannon-ball, and bury themselves so deeply in the memory that they cannot be unearthed. Then, too, Mr. Rossetti is a master of mono

syllabic words, generally so hazardous both to dignity and grace, and uses them freely, often through a whole line, and sometimes through two consecutive lines, and even into a third, with no loss, but a clear gain of both literary and emotional effect. These may seem trivial things; but those to whom poetry is an art as well as an inspiration know that nothing is trivial which can be used as a means for stamping fine and enduring impressions. There was inspiration enough and to spare for the tuneful breath to which we listen in such sonnets as Love-sight, Love-sweetness, Winged Hours, Secret Parting, and Mary Magdalene; but inspiration alone would never have realized their accomplished perfectness. It is the inspiration that masters us in such intense and sombre utterances as Vain Virtues, The Sun's Shame, The Refusal of Aid between Nations, and the great and terrible Lost Days; but it is art which assures to inspiration the mastery. The man who wrote the sonnet For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione, which for beauty, pure, absolute, inviolate, has no equal in the volumes of any English poet, is above all things an artist; and for sonnet craftsmanship which realizes the ideal, which leaves us with the pleasant languor of supreme satisfaction, the delicious drowsiness of fulfilled delight, we know of nothing comparable to these great gifts which we owe to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

We here necessarily conclude our survey of the history of "The Sonnet in England." Our task has been a pleasant one, for the record is one of continued and beautiful growth. There seemed little promise in the Italian exotic which Sir Thomas Wyat planted in English soil; but it has flourished and blossomed and borne fruit abundantly. Arbitrary as is the form of the sonnet, its arbitrariness must be in accord with great expressional laws, or so many poets would not have chosen it as the vehicle for their finest fancies, their loftiest thoughts, their intensest emotions. This choice, made so often and vindicated so splendidly, has produced a literature within a literature, a domain within a domain, and though it is composed of scanty plots of ground, they spread over a wide expanse through which we may wander long, and yet leave many of its flowers unseen and unculled. Rich as the sonnet literature of England is now, it is becoming every day richer and fuller of potential promise, and though the possibilities of the form may be susceptible of exhaustion, there are no present signs of it, but only of new and bounteous developments. Even were no addition made to the store which has accumulated through more than two centuries, the sonnet-work of our English poets would remain for ever one of the most precious of the intellectual possessions of the nation.

JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE.

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF THE FUTURE.

T

HERE cannot be two opinions as to the prejudicial influence exerted upon the industrial interests of Great Britain by the unsatisfactory state into which the question of apprenticeship has been gradually drifting, and out of which it has not yet begun to rise anew. Out of harmony with the necessities and conditions of the times, a relic of days long past, ere the steam-engine, or perhaps even the printing-press, had rendered great manufacturing industries possible, the system of apprenticeship, which has been handed down to us from our forefathers, is so strangely at variance with the most obvious principles of sound educational science, to say nothing of sound economic theory, that there is little wonder that it has fallen into discredit, and that the legal provisions under which it grew and flourished have been suffered to lapse into a dead letter. Time was when, for the most part, the skilled artisan, who was master of his trade, worked at home in his own house, assisted, it might be, by a few younger workmen or journeymen. Into his house and family he would receive one or two young lads to learn, during a seven years' engagement, the art and mystery of his craft; the master himself working and teaching them his work, feeding and clothing them, and receiving from them in return the value of the services which, as they became more apt in their work, they were able to render. The advantages of thorough training by the continuous care of the master were unquestionably proven by the universal adoption of the system. The ancient trade guilds grew and acquired their legal status upon this usage as their very foundation, and a seven years' apprenticeship formed the one necessary qualification for the possession of the right to exercise the following of any occupation or employment, art or craft, recognized amongst the handicrafts of the time.

With the extension of trade and the wider use of machinery

the number and power of the adult employed workmen increased, and with their increase of power came a jealousy, on the one hand, toward the masters; on the other, toward the apprentices, who were regarded as cheapening labour when employed in too great numbers. The conflict which arose between employer and employed gradually merged into one between capital and labour. By dint of strikes the workmen at last prevailed, and in attempting to bring about a limitation in the amount of apprenticeship labour, brought about a result of quite another kind, and one far more disastrous than the evil sought to be remedied -the destruction of all the best and most important features of apprenticeship. Other issues aided in the accomplishment of the course thus entered on. Mr. George Howell has so well delineated the outlines of the change, that the transcription of a few of his words will suffice to complete the tale.

"But a change was coming o'er the spirit of the dream: another day was dawning fraught with still greater issues to the journeymen, for, instead of the old system of master and craftsmen, there grew up quite another kind of mastership and of hiring. The master had already begun to be less the craftsman and more of the employer. Capital was fast becoming the great motive power. Streams were first utilized, then steam; complicated machinery was being substituted for hand labour in many of the growing industries of the time; the master no longer worked at the trade himself, he directed and found the capital. The number of persons employed was also greatly augmented; instead of the old fealty between master and men there came estrangement more and more, until sometimes the workpeople scarcely ever saw their veritable employer. Under these circumstances the conditions of apprenticeship were completely changed, not suddenly, but gradually, until the apprentice became merely the boy worker, with less wages but more solemn engagements than a journeyman. The master to whom he was bound no longer taught him his trade; he was, so to speak, pitchforked into the workshop to pick up his trade as best he could, or to learn it from the many journeymen who were there employed. It was no one's duty to teach him; there was no pay and no responsibility."

The present state of British commerce brings home the conviction that it is no idle cry that has sounded ever and anon in our ears, warning us of the deterioration in the quality of our manufactures and in the average calibre of our skilled artisans. International Exhibitions have from time to time afforded the means of drawing comparisons between the work of other nations and our own work; comparisons by no means always in our favour, often the reverse. Apprenticeship, with its wholesome rules, having decayed in everything but form, the lads who enter the shops are never properly instructed, but are made the drudges of the older workmen. What wonder that they acquire habits of idleness and carelessness that not only pursue them through the whole of their work, but, worse than this, corrupt and undermine their morals? What wonder that their manipulation is but half acquired, or that the methods and devices they learn to apply are those of half a century ago; ancient relics of prejudice and unscientific "rules of thumb," handed down by the tradition of the shops, a veritable survival of the unfittest? Without the shadow of a doubt the truth that there is