finished, it will be necessary to secure it by means of glass and frame. This is undoubtedly a drawback to pastel. The alternative of course is the fixing of the drawing by one or other of the various methods described in the handbooks. But whichever of the means be used the result is always a reduction and a flattening of the tones and loss of brightness, so that the frame and glass are absolutely essential to preserve a pastel drawing. Even then, careful handling is advisable, for shaking or knocking will cause some of the looser grains of crayon to become detached and fall as a fine dust within the glass. But with due and reasonable care, a pastel painting will last as long and retain its freshness of colour, as well or better than pictures in oil or water colour. Absolute immutability is, of course, not to be claimed for any of the devices which are available for pictorial practice. Oil paint changes and darkens in colour, and is apt to crack and peel off if used roughly or exposed to alternations of temperature; water colour suffers from exposure to light, and is especially prone to be injured by damp air; and in the mechanism or material of every other artistic process, there is some weak point that will appear as time goes on. "Compared with other technical devices, pastel is in some respects the most permanent of them all. Given that amount of safeguarding which is the due of every type of art work, it will outlast the rival processes that have taken its place in the popular favour. Unlike oil painting, it neither cracks nor peels, and it is subject to no chemical changes which will darken or alter its colour; unlike water-colour it does not fade nor sink into the surface of the paper," Its one weakness, the shaking off, or loosening of the particles of pastel, is easy to guard against. Once framed, let it be carefully handled, and the rough usage avoided to which no picture should be exposed, and your pastel will retain its freshness.

ing," the household divinities must be made to understand something of this. One's imagination reels at the thought of a pastel removed from its frame in order to dust it! But so it does at the thought of the application of Monkey Setting aside the perils of Soap to an oil painting!

the Spring cleaning, damp is the only enemy to be feared, and damp is equally dangerous to water colours or engravings, and will slowly but surely destroy even the most carefully painted oil picture.

Indeed, the balance of advantage lies, on the whole, with pastel painting, and if this fact can be impressed upon the people who are at present labouring under a misconception, it will do something towards reviving its popularity. With ordinary care, pastel paintings, it may be safely assumed, will last unimpaired in beauty for centuries.

To the amateur it offers a tempting, perhaps a too tempting, method of artistic expression. The simplicity and ease of its manipulation, the facility with which pleasing effects are obtained quickly, without any of the labour and patience required in oil or water-colour painting, invite the student of colour and form, and lure him on without the disappointments and trials of the more difficult mediums. The worst of the process is, that it encourages a slipshod style of working. It is so easy to erase, blot, or bury up, that a carelessness of values is generated, and it is so easy a material with which to work that fixity of intention is even difficult.

Notwithstanding the evidences of the revived interest in pastel, it is but rarely met with in our provincial exhibitions.

The committees do not seem quite sure what to do with a pastel, even when it has run the gauntlet of the selecting sub-committee. At the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition, we have seen occasional examples of the art, considerately

hung in the doorways. They are catalogued indifferently amongst oil pictures or water-colour drawings.

So little commercial value has pastel at the present day that it must be regarded for a long time to come as an artist's art.

Here is an opportunity for the municipal patronage of the fine arts, apart from commercial values.

Why wait for the voice of the picture dealers to declare that pastel is once more an art worthy of serious attention?

OF the three several ways in which greatness is supposed

to come to a man, surely the fact that it is thrust upon him must give him the keenest relish and the highest delight. However favourable the conditions under which a man is born, they can afford him no lively feelings of satisfaction. He is only entering upon the journey of life and is without any means of making either a comparison or a contrast; so that whether he be born in the purple or first see light in a cottage, is to him at that period, whatever it may be later in life, a matter of supreme indifference. And even as the years go on the man who is born to greatness must find it so natural to him that he needs the same effort of mind to grasp the significance of the gift that we do to realise how essential the air is to our existence when we are unconsciously breathing it every minute of our lives.

To achieve greatness, to accomplish any great work, must give a thrill of pleasure, or, failing that, at least some measure of satisfaction that our efforts have been rewarded with success, even though this is followed by disillusionment at the result, or by recollections of what the struggle has cost, or even by regrets at the completion of a task. When Gibbon, after nearly fifteen years of labour, had finished his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," he writes in his Autobiography: "I will not

dissemble the first emotions of joy on recovery of my freedom and perhaps of the establishment of my fame, but my pride was soon tumbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion."

But when we think of greatness thrust upon anyone, of fame coming unsought to a man, then must we see the rarest form of honour. This indeed must give the height of pleasurable gratification, like a spring of clear cold water to a tired and thirsty traveller in a hot desert, or a lump of gold unexpectedly encountering the toes of a down-at-heart settler in a new country. To this fate has been subjected the Right Honourable Augustine Birrell, His Majesty's Chief Secretary for Ireland. He has had greatness thrust upon him. It is his good fortune to have his name associated with a word that has enlarged the vocabulary of perhaps the greatest language and the finest literature that the world has known-a language that bids fair in years to come to be the most widely prevalent means of conveying the ideas and enshrining the thoughts of the greater part of the millions of inhabitants of our sphere. When they reflect upon this his children, if he have any, must surely rise up and call him blessed.

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It has crossed my mind that there may be some matterof-fact people who would refuse to see anything of value in this honour; people to whom words are mere light and airy nothings, and who are ignorant of the fact that words are the only things which last for ever"; people who are concerned only with the utility of speech, and are unconscious of all the mystery, magic and charm of words; people who never think that it is through the possession of language, above everything else, that man has been able to take so supreme a position in the universe, that he has become "the roof and crown of things." To such I reply by asking what gives a thing value in their eyes? Why are they willing to give so much more of their labour, thought and effort, put, of course, into that