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—unfairly hung in the architectural room-there is one of those blunders, so unaccountable in a patient and determined student of nature, such as every thing he has done proves Mr. Anthony to be. How comes he to give us a crescent, when the relative positions of the luminaries of day and night necessary for his peculiar effect can only occur at the time of full moon?

Mr. Hunt's mountain-subject, the "Stream from LlynIdwal" is one of the most perfectly rendered passages from nature in the whole Exhibition.

It is not, however, our object to go into detailed criticism of this year's pictures. We must close our article with a few words on a subject for exhausting which volumes would not suffice; viz. the conditions which English life and the practice of exhibition impose on our artists. The evils of exhibition, in particular, are so serious, that we have gradually come to regard our annual picture-shows as about the most pernicious of the many mischievous influences against which the artist and art-critic in this country have to contend. It engenders in the painter a tendency to those extravagances and exaggerations which, in a sale of pictures, are likeliest to attract the attention of a mob of spectators. It provokes the young to mannerism and imitation of every thing that is visibly popular; it confirms the old in faults and bad habits, which are found not to stand in the way of, but to promote, the sale of pictures. In the spectator it fosters habits of superficial consideration and hasty judgment, and, by provoking comparison between pictures never meant to be compared, it leads away from every thing like just estimation. On the other hand, if the Academy Exhibition be a bad school, it is a worse shop. The academicians have the virtual monopoly of the best places-(though this year the hanging, generally speaking, has been most honest)—and any work may at any time be damned to unsaleableness by the carelessness or cruelty of the hanging committee. Few are aware of the degree to which—in the case of young painters at least—the hanging of a picture in the Exhibition affects its marketable value.

At the same time, it is difficult to see how we are to escape from the Exhibition nuisance.

In France the Government can parcel out among distinguished painters the decoration of rooms in palaces or municipal buildings, and of chapels in churches, as well as command works of them for public galleries. All the principal painters of France are at this moment employed in such national decorative work. The Emperor of France seems to aim at putting Paris-as far as the employment of artists goes-on a par with Venice, Florence, and Rome in their palmy days, and of Munich under its late aesthetic king. Whatever we may think

of the merits of the art thus fostered, we can have no hesitation in admitting that such employment implies a recognition of the higher purposes and nobler functions of painting, which has never been admitted by the governing authority of England, except in the case of the New Houses of Parliament. And even in that case, with what timidity and half-heartedness our Fine-Art Commissioners have gone to work!

Debarred from public or municipal employment-the only substitute possible in this country for the field which the Church opened to the medieval painter-our artists find themselves forced to cater for private purchasers, and have to choose between the nobler and ignobler way of meeting this condition. Hitherto too many of them have stooped to the easy and gainful success which can be insured by the meretricious, the tricky, and the .conventional. The Pre-Raphaelites, as a body, have made a stand for the truth, however naked or unacceptable; and they will in time, no doubt, attain the power of giving us beauty without any sacrifice of truth.

In the touch of common earth lies the secret of all the revivals of strength that art-schools have ever known. It was by going back to nature that Giotto gave life and motion to the swaddled muse of Byzantine art, which was itself but the abortion of ancient art stiffened into conformity with legendary types and fettered by theological rules. It was thus that the naturalists of the Netherlands reanimated the bastard Italico-Flemish school of Bernard van Orly and Michael Coxcie. It was thus that our own Reynolds rose above the effete followers of Lely and Kneller; and that Hogarth some hundred years ago, and Wilkie in our own days, gave, each, a new life to painting.

We can see no hope for modern art but in determined reverence for and faithful rendering of nature. This much is certain. What hope may be for art, thus inspired and thus working, we will not attempt to determine.

ART. IV. MR. FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. By James Anthony Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker and Son. 1856.

To define accurately how a perfect history of England should be written in the present day would probably be as difficult and impossible a task as could well occupy the attention of a thinking man. We are, for our own part, inclined to cut the gordian knot by asserting that the age of complete histories of great modern nations is past, and that we must expect henceforward to deal. with detailed monographs and summary dissertations. A leading statesman, indeed, by the emphatic manner in which he has proclaimed that the History of England has still to be written, seems inclined to encourage the idea that a goodly row of volumes may yet rejoice our eyes, which, bearing throughout the impress of one great mind, shall take the place which Hume and Smollett held in the confidence of the eighteenth century, and serve at the same time as an unfailing repertory of facts and an exponent of the reflex philosophy of the present age. That such a gifted individual may arise we should be loth utterly to deny; that there is any ordinary probability of his advent we should be equally unwilling to admit. The spirit of the times is decidedly unfavourable to such a phenomenon. The "historic fancies" of the public mind are at present, at least, too self-conflicting to be easily blended in an authoritative canon. We want a microscopic survey of the universe, which can be achieved without interfering with the current business and pleasures of life. We are enamoured of the strange motley complexion of that pageant which we can resuscitate from the records of the past. But we are not satisfied with gazing on the shifting colours with the unquestioning satisfaction of a child; we must analyse them into their primitive elements, resolve their varied combinations, and endeavour to recombine them into some standard of comparison with our own experience. In short, we like to act the critic over the toys of our sensuous imagination, to philosophise with the present, and at the same time follow our ancestors back into the minutiae of the everyday experience of the past. We wish to know every thing which they did and thought, and not only why they did it and why they thought it, but also what rank their decision entitles them to hold among the conscious and unconscious seers of the nineteenth century, and what share may be

fairly allotted to them in the working out of the great human problem, with the progress of which up to the present time we flatter ourselves that we are so fortunately acquainted. Happy is it for our theory of history should we stop here, and not saddle ourselves with the additional task of converting this hardlyattained knowledge of the past into a monitor of our present and future career. We want, in fact, in easy combination, a wellindexed dictionary of facts, a judiciously-harmonised gallery of ancient and modern pictures, and a systematised code of political and social morality. While we make these great demands from the historian, we do not give him even the chance of approval which he might derive from unity of opinion and wishes among his censors. We have ceased to have a national creed on the prominent events of our history. We have scarcely even distinct schools of historical faith. We are Harry Wynds in our historical polemics, each fighting for his own hand. While such is our controversial mood, we must content ourselves with more fragmentary productions; and build up from them, each of us for himself, our own conception of what England and Englishmen have been and are likely to become.

The history from the pen of Mr. Froude, with the first two volumes of which we are here presented, requires some such explanatory preface to reconcile us both to its redundancies and its defects. It is, however, a work of such sterling merit, apart from its claims as a model of English writing, that we could easily forgive these errors, were they even greater than they are. Mr. Froude has confined himself in these volumes much more closely than is usually deemed necessary to the events of a very few years of English history; and the minuteness with which he has detailed some occurrences would lead us at the first glance to suppose that he had trodden almost too closely in the footsteps of the general chronicler, and not preserved the due proportion between the space allotted to important and trivial incidents. And yet, on the other hand, the "dictionary-of-reference" theory would be sadly at fault in his pages, and we miss not a little which we should have confidently looked for in a work on such a scale. But the explanation would seem to be, that Mr. Froude has written (as is the case with our best modern historians) with a purpose, a theory, and certain special acquisitions of knowledge; and that it is through the medium of these, and under the limitations which they impose, and the amplifications which they induce, that his history has assumed its present shape. He is avowedly the Protestant historian, and as such naturally lingers longer over those portions of his studies which elucidate that view of the relations of the parties in the great religious controversy which appears to him to have been hitherto neglected. He has in his

scale of events to consider what has been written out already, and to supply in preference that which has been passed over. He is, therefore, in some measure incapacitated for being the general historian, who should run with equal and unbroken pace over the well-worn and the half-discovered facts of his narrative. Mr. Froude's history is thus a monograph, not merely as respects the short time over which it is spread, but also in the special prominence given to certain features of the age, and the complete silence respecting others. Writing, however, from himself, he has also written for himself; and his errors rather lie in the direction of exclusive adherence to certain sources of information to which his special historical theory assigns a somewhat excessive authority. He has taken up the cause of a most unpopular king, perhaps with a little of the unconscious satisfaction of one who feels guarded by the isolation of his position from being a commonplace copyist of others. There may be, arising from this, some exaggeration of the extent to which his new materials have modified the grounds upon which prior judgments have been formed, and a disposition to consider himself more entirely removed than is actually the case from the arena of common opinion. After all his labours, our knowledge of the facts on which our estimate of the characters and events of that age must be based remains hardly altered in any remarkable particular; and it is in the interpretation of these ascertained facts, in the relative value assigned to particular classes of evidence, and in the inferential reasoning as to motives and justifications, that the novelty and importance of Mr. Froude's history will be found to consist.

As an expression of judgment, the characteristic of these volumes is the favourable view taken of the character of Henry VIII. The author seems disposed to assume very high ground on this point, and virtually to maintain that the character of the whole English nation at this period is bound up with our condemnation or acquittal of their sovereign. He holds them to have been so identified in will as well as in fact with his most strongly impugned actions, that we must consign to infamy along with Henry those men with whose lives we are accustomed to associate the first impulses to the modern prosperity of our country, and the birth and guardianship of the great religious and political revolutions which have given to England her distinctive position among European nations. The dilemma, could it be established, would be a most embarrassing one for those who entertain some little doubt as to the purity of the motives by which King Henry was actuated. Even with what we admit to have been the real fact, there is enough seriously to perplex any one who has been accustomed to draw broad deductions as to

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