analogy presented to us-let us whitewash and purify-let us live generously, but carefully; and if we discover any small premonitory signs of ill health, such as a tampering with a six-pound franchise, or a rule-of-three suffrage, let us think of Gladstone in his Quarantine, and be warned.

THE PICTURESQUE IN MORALS.

ONE of our periodicals lately contained a paper, inquiring, with some skill, into the sources of what we call the picturesque, and asking how it comes to pass that the ruined wall, the broken gable, the lichen-clad stone, afford us a pleasure that a trim enclosure, a finished building, and a well-scrubbed pavement fail to afford. Though the writer in question put some very searching and pertinent questions, though he exhibited in strong contrast the two sides of his thesis, I am not very sure that he did not leave us in the end to the same doubts and difficulties which beset us when we set out.

The search after truth is, however, a sort of vetturino journey, in which, if you make little progress towards your destination, you are always gaining some small experience or other on the way. There is no fable so applicable to our daily lives as that of

the husbandman who bequeathed the treasure to his three sons, who arrived at their riches by a search after a very different El Dorado. This is the story of every one of us. For one man who goes straight to his object, and finds that object worth all his devotion. there are thousands who turn off into some by-path of fortune, well satisfied with what they have found there, and right contented to leave that great journey they once dreamed of to some later day; and thus we no more realise to ourselves the greatness we imagined in our school-days than we marry our first loves, or do any one of the scores of things we once held to be the only tie that bound us to existence.

The author of the paper on the picturesque has not, I own, revealed to me the secret of that occult attachment that binds us to the crumbling arch, the shattered pillar, the lightning-struck trunk. We know, with our great humorist, that the Rector's horse is beautiful, and the Curate's picturesque; but we cannot tell why; nor can we explain why what to the eye of possession seems mean and miserable, to the eye of painting may have a value all but priceless. Let not my reader for a moment imagine that I have discovered the secret of this curious tendency—a tendency amongst educated people that is almost an instinct. I am as much in the dark about

it as my neighbours. In thinking over the matter, however, it occurred to me that there might be some mysterious chord in our nature that only vibrated to the touch of compassion-that we had in our hearts a little Bethesda pool of kindliness that adversity alone could stir, and that whatever inspired us with a sentiment of tender pity reacted in gratitude upon the object, and rendered it to our eyes pleasing, interesting, and picturesque.

Smug comfort and trim gentility have no want of us; they make no call upon our affections, no appeal to our sympathies. Nay, in their very selfsufficiency they seem to resent the interference of our interest. Not so with the ruined cabin or the tattered shieling, the weather-beaten hovel or the tottering tower; these come to us for pity. They have a story, and a touching one. They tell of a time when they bestowed comfort and shelter, they speak of a bygone-perhaps of even power and greatness. There are ruins which even in decay are princely; and in our sadness may lie the secret of that sympathy which binds us to them, and renders them, as all objects of our relief really are, our best benefactors. Bear in mind that through all our sense of the picturesque there mingles a tender melancholy. It is the spirit the very opposite to that inspired by the grotesque. There is no levity about it at all,

and from him who would endeavour to invest it with such a character, we would turn away revolted.

Whatever so touches our sensibilities that we weave a story about it to ourselves, that we think of it with reference to a past time-a time perhaps of bright promise and hope-that we fancy how under other circumstances a happier destiny might have befallen it, and that there must be some cruelty in the fate that has left of what was once beautiful these shattered columns, these broken capitals, these crumbling friezes; it is out of these mingled compassions and regrets we arrive at what, by a sort of compromise with our feelings, we call the picturesque.

Now, I am less anxious to prove my theory—which my reader may take for what it may seem worth to him—than to extend its application, and I would ask if a great deal of the sympathy we accord to whatever is wrong in this world of ours is not derived from a process akin to that I have just spoken of, and if our admiration of naughty people be not a part and parcel of our love of the picturesque?

That we do admire them I suppose will not be denied. We are not merely admirers; we imitate them in their style, their dress, and their belongings. Our novelists take them as their types of fascination, and our preachers warn us against them

as snares.