him to the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street. The British Museum comprehends a square in the heart of London. To go through it is like walking through the avenues of a dead world. It is a pleasant toil, but toil it certainly is. By going day after day, or rather week after week, it may be slowly conquered. When in visiting Athens I saw the holes in the frieze of the Parthenon out of which the Elgin marbles had been torn, it was with a feeling of indignation and sorrow; but as one reflects that it was by this means that the sculptures were probably saved from the destruction of war, or from being ground into lime by the Turks, and that they have been the instrumentality of regenerating modern Art, he is reconciled to the change; and perhaps, hereafter, when Greece becomes a nation worthy of the name, some "Great Eastern" will transport the marbles back again, and they will take their old place in the entablature of the temple. In passing the case that contains the "Codex Alexandrinus," one is inclined, like my genial and accomplished friend Mr. Henry Stevens, the librarian of the American department of the library to take off his hat. This version, according to Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Alexandria, was copied by an Egyptian woman named Thecla, in the fourth century; and it bears evident marks of female chirography. Tischendorf and other modern scholars, however, assign it to the fifth century. It stands next in value after the Vatican and Sinaitic versions. It was a gift from Cyril to Charles I., in 1629.

CHAPTER III.

LONDON ART AND THE LONDON PULPIT.

ART in London has been derided by those who live on the Continent, and nothing beautiful is thought capable of blossoming in that foggy atmosphere. It is true that Nelson's monument in Trafalgar Square does not permit Nelson to be seen; and Wellington's statue at Hyde Park is the ideal of military "old fogyism; " and all the " pleasant singers are Italians; and many of the metropolitan sculptors and builders have foreign names; yet, in spite of all, London is one of the world's art-centres. It would be too great a task to discuss English Art as developed in the numberless schools, galleries, and expositions of London. Between three and four thousand new pictures are annually on exhibition. Who can say that English Art is doing nothing? Perhaps nowhere in the world is there so much done, to judge by the quantity, and in some respects the quality, of the fruits. There has been an important revolution in English Art, as every one knows, since the days of Reynolds, Wilson, Romney, and Gainsborough. In some respects it has lost, but

in others gained, power. The trials of Wilkie, the agonies of Haydon, and above all the eccentric but inspired studies of Turner, have produced decided changes. English Art has gained in natural vigor, and in truthfulness of drawing and detail, what it has lost in ideal power. It is a good thing to go back to Nature, and copy even her stones correctly; this lays a foundation for genius to build upon. Pre-Raphaelitism is already giving over its minute realness, and beginning to clothe its leanness with the beauty of life and of higher truth. It has done good; but it has not proved that those things which God has made small and earthly are as beautiful as those he has made great and heavenly. "There are glories terrestrial and glories celestial." Purity is not sufficient for greatness, or a little child would be morally greater than a tried and victorious man. Passion, ideality, the divine life, must breathe and glow in every truly great work of Art. I am Ruskinite enough to think that Turner, in his best style, was as near an approach to the great English painter as has yet been made. "But after my words they spake not," said Job; and who wishes to enter into an elaborate discussion of Turner after the Oxford oracle has spoken. Turner did a great work, if it were only to have been the occasion of Ruskin's marvelous eloquence. One has a perfect right, however, to look, and see, and judge whether he likes or dislikes Turner's paintings. There was, when I was in London, a fine oppor

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tunity to do this at the Kensington Museum, popularly the "Boilers," where there were three large rooms full of Turner's best and worst pictures, arranged it is said by Mr. Ruskin himself. What impressed me most in Turner's greatest pictures, those which belong principally to his second and sound style, was their imaginative power. In such paintings as "Dido building Carthage," in the National Gallery, and the " Shipwreck," and "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus,” and “The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth" (who gave these taking titles?1) and "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," say what you will about their "light" and "atmosphere," their " depth" and "aërial perspective," it is the power that brings before you new things, that calls them up from the pure realm of imagination, it is this poetic power that gives the charm to these pictures. They awake the sense of the infinite that a great poem does. They take down the bars and let you into the green fields of joy and freedom. One has the feeling(always a delightful one) that the author of these pictures could do any thing he wished, could build a Carthage or a Rome.

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As I was looking at one of those sublime scrawls before which the real votary of Turner is drunk with frenzy, a plain farmer's wife came in and read

1 Since writing the above I have seen it expressly stated in Thornbury's biography of Turner, that the name of "The Fighting Téméraire," and the names of others of his pictures, were Mr. Turner's own titles. Turner was a poet, though he wrote but poor poetry. His poems were his pictures.

the title, "The Day after the Deluge." "Wull! I should think it wur!" was the only remark she made; and then she walked through the room without noticing another picture.

That there is any thing in these later fantasies of Turner's brain which appeals to the universal understanding and common sentiment of beauty, I cannot suppose; though, for expressing this opinion, an Englishman almost told me that there was a want of appreciation in myself. And he added, moreover, that these last pictures of Turner commanded better prices than his earlier ones. I pitied him as too far gone to be saved. Looked at as unfinished sketches, or dashing experiments in color, or studies of the concentration of light, they are artistically interesting, and some of them have a confused grandeur, as the sketches of "A Fire at Sea," and "The Deluge." But to call the "Angel standing in the Sun," and "Rain, Steam, and Speed," and "Hannibal crossing the Alps," and the various spotty reflexes of "Venice," true pictures of Nature, or of a healthy imagination, this were like calling Carlyle's worst style pure English. They have no regard to form or fact. They are but dashes, streaks of pigment. Take the picture called "Tapping the Furnace; there is no furnace, nor bell, nor workshop, nor any thing that particularizes such a scene, but it is a universal explosion of high colors. Yet before Turner's finished pictures, radiant with truthful splendors, full of the movement of life, boldly fol