in France with somewhat the same aims and characteristics, but on the whole very inferior to ours.

The earliest and the greatest master of the school is Watteau, who in his way is a painter of undoubted genius; Lancret, too, was a fine painter, but I have never been able to bestow much admiration on the other masters, such as Boucher, Fragonard, and the rest.

They differed from the English school in not being chiefly portrait-painters, but they had the same feeling for the charm of a very artificial femininity set in a background of equally artificial landscape. The women of the English painters, however, are far more attractive than the soulless minxes who disport themselves so coquettishly in the French canvases of the period.

On the whole, this French type is a very poor one. The expression of the face is vivacious and not unpleasing, but the features are never fine, and there is no trace of intellect in the heads. The forms are soft and rounded, but have not much else to recommend them, and the grace of the attitudes is of a painfully artificial nature.

This very mannered school received an added touch of spurious sentiment and descended to a still lower depth of artificiality in Greuze, who is to me one of the most offensive of painters, and yet there is no denying that the type he invented and repeated with such wearisome iteration is a pretty one. It generally represents a young girl about fourteen or fifteen, a time of life that has been avoided by painters as being neither one thing nor the other-neither child nor woman. But for that very reason Greuze seems to delight in it. He invests it with a false innocence and a real coquetry that seem to me singularly out of place in such childish creatures. But pretty they are, in a sort of large-eyed, small-mouthed manner. And then came the Revolution, with its curious revival of classicism, and these hot-house women of the ancien régime got swept away for ever both in nature and in art.

To return to England, the tradition of Sir Joshua and the others was carried on by Sir Thomas Lawrence in an unfortunately vulgarised form. The type is, if anything, more artificial; but the charm, except in the very best of his pictures, has evaporated. They are painted with an extraordinary ability of a very tricky and flashy kind. And then we gradually descend into the mere inanities of the early Victorian era.

And now we come to the Moderns. What shall we say of them? Have we an ideal of beauty at all? If we have, it is of a very varied kind. The day of definite schools and of more or less stable fashions seems to have gone. At any rate we are not monotonous, and out of all this chaos we may evolve an ideal some day that will be all the better for the wide range of types from which it is selected.

But we have not found it yet.

JOHN COLLIER.

as criminals for having broken the law that forbade a man who had bought food-stuff at a certain price to sell it on the same day and at the same place at a higher, or for dealing in 'futures' in hops or grain. By such pitiful devices did our ancestors seek to abate the pinch of hunger which was felt as a grim reality in almost every cottage in the land.

Those Englishmen who sat down at the close of December 1800 to review the state of their country must have felt that the survey was by no means cheerful. The century that was drawing to a close had seen England overtaken by many misfortunes. The loss of the American colonies had been a blow to the national pride of the sorest kind; the military and naval struggles of the last decade had seemed to tax our resources to the uttermost, and none knew how much longer the sword was to continue to dominate the Continent; but, above all, the state of our domestic affairs was lamentable. Political parties were sharply divided, and the most brilliant leader of the Opposition was in open sympathy with the enemies of the country, whilst the sufferings of the poor had reached a stage at which it seemed impossible that they could be longer endured. One can imagine the amiable diarist of that day shaking his head sadly over the actual condition of the country and the prospect before it. What would he have thought if he had known that Britain was only at the beginning of a long period of war and peril, that the First Consul was soon to blossom into an Emperor who was to make himself the dictator of Europe, and that fifteen years of constant struggle and ever-increasing privation were to elapse before England could secure the blessed fruits of peace on the field of Waterloo? As one looks back upon that period it seems marvellous that our country-no world-empire then, but a single little island in the northern sea-was able to bear the strain to which both its resources and its courage were subjected. Many of us are old enough to remember the long peace which followed the overthrow of Napoleon, and those who do so can bear witness to the fact that it was the peace of a common exhaustion rather than the repose which is the legitimate reward of victory. The wealth of Europe, in blood and brain and muscle, as well as in money, had been poured out so freely during the awful years of war that when peace came the nations were left in a state of depletion resembling that of the fever patient whose blood has been let too freely by the surgeon. And in this condition there sprang up not unnaturally a profound abhorrence of war. Many of us can remember how thirty years after Napoleon had been sent to St. Helena the British Army, in which there was still many a veteran who bore the Waterloo medal on his breast, was regarded with almost open contempt and dislike by the public. The Commander-in-Chief himself believed that it must as far as possible be kept out of sight. It was recruited

month, too, in which the first tiny shoots of more than one new movement, that may either be withered prematurely by some untimely frost or preserved to grow to full maturity, have become visible above the surface. Before we touch upon these things one looks back instinctively for a hundred years, to the time when our fathers were watching the passing of the Eighteenth Century as we now watch the birth of the Twentieth. Historians tell us that the year 1800 began with hot disputes as to whether it was the first day of the new century or the last of the old one. The wise men of Europe were greatly agitated by the contention, until the astronomers came in and settled it authoritatively by the decree that 1801, not 1800, must be regarded as the first year of the Nineteenth Century. It seems strange nowa-days that the old generation could have interested themselves in such a question, considering the times in which they lived. A hundred years ago History seemed to be wearing its seven-league boots and striding onwards with a rapidity which might well have left most mortals without breath to waste on pettifogging disputations of no practical importance. Buonaparte-they still spelt the name in the Italian fashion in 1800-was overawing the Directory, placing himself at the head of the Grand Army, crossing the Alps, and fighting the battle of Marengo, events which even now stand out like mountains in the march of the ages. England was still shivering in apprehension of that invasion of her shores which was something more than a vision of the panic-stricken; but despite her alarms she was playing her part in the great world with her accustomed stubborn resolution, as the capture of Malta and the preparations for the expedition which was to drive the French from Egypt proved. Pitt was Prime Minister, and the year was that which saw the legislative union of England and Ireland accomplished by the lavish expenditure of that English gold which our enemies abroad dreaded almost as much as English steel. But it was not upon historic events like these that the minds of the King and his people were fixed in 1800. There was something still nearer to their hearts than the conquest of an island in the Mediterranean or the union of the British and Irish Parliaments. This was what in after-days came to be known as the condition of the people question.' In the King's speech at the opening of the Session of 1800 the only topic that found special mention was the price of food. It was a topic that well deserved this melancholy pre-eminence; for in that year wheat stood at 1288. the quarter, or exactly 100s. more than that at which it figures in the price list of Mark Lane to-day. Was it wonderful that those who made our laws should feel themselves driven by the pressure of national want to try every kind of remedy that wisdom or folly could suggest for the poverty and suffering of the nation? So we find, as we look back to 1800, the story of trials in which business men were arraigned

as criminals for having broken the law that forbade a man who had bought food-stuff at a certain price to sell it on the same day and at the same place at a higher, or for dealing in futures' in hops or grain. By such pitiful devices did our ancestors seek to abate the pinch of hunger which was felt as a grim reality in almost every cottage in the land.

Those Englishmen who sat down at the close of December 1800 to review the state of their country must have felt that the survey was by no means cheerful. The century that was drawing to a close had seen England overtaken by many misfortunes. The loss of the American colonies had been a blow to the national pride of the sorest kind; the military and naval struggles of the last decade had seemed to tax our resources to the uttermost, and none knew how much longer the sword was to continue to dominate the Continent; but, above all, the state of our domestic affairs was lamentable. Political parties were sharply divided, and the most brilliant leader of the Opposition was in open sympathy with the enemies of the country, whilst the sufferings of the poor had reached a stage at which it seemed impossible that they could be longer endured. One can imagine the amiable diarist of that day shaking his head sadly over the actual condition of the country and the prospect before it. What would he have thought if he had known that Britain was only at the beginning of a long period of war and peril, that the First Consul was soon to blossom into an Emperor who was to make himself the dictator of Europe, and that fifteen years of constant struggle and ever-increasing privation were to elapse before England could secure the blessed fruits of peace on the field of Waterloo? As one looks back upon that period it seems marvellous that our country-no world-empire then, but a single little island in the northern sea-was able to bear the strain to which both its resources and its courage were subjected. Many of us are old enough to remember the long peace which followed the overthrow of Napoleon, and those who do so can bear witness to the fact that it was the peace of a common exhaustion rather than the repose which is the legitimate reward of victory. The wealth of Europe, in blood and brain and muscle, as well as in money, had been poured out so freely during the awful years of war that when peace came the nations were left in a state of depletion resembling that of the fever patient whose blood has been let too freely by the surgeon. And in this condition there sprang up not unnaturally a profound abhorrence of war. Many of us can remember how thirty years after Napoleon had been sent to St. Helena the British Army, in which there was still many a veteran who bore the Waterloo medal on his breast, was regarded with almost open contempt and dislike by the public. The Commander-in-Chief himself believed that it must as far as possible be kept out of sight. It was recruited

either from the scum of the nation or from reckless young men who had allowed themselves to be cajoled when under the influence of drink into taking the Queen's shilling. When once a man had enlisted he was regarded by his family and friends as being lost to them for life. The Yeomanry, which had been relied upon in the days of great national emergency as an important branch of the army of defence, had fallen into such contempt that when the members of the different corps during their few days of annual training appeared in the streets in uniform they were everywhere pursued with insulting and mocking cries. In all these things could be read proofs of the terrible reaction which had followed the strain of the Great War. In the political world signs of the same 'swing of the pendulum' were to be seen in the great political and economic reforms which had wrested power from the hands of the privileged few and opened up those new avenues of trade and industry that were eventually to be the means by which our fabulous national wealth was at last poured in upon us. The philosophic observer of a hundred years ago could, of course, no more have foreseen these things than he could have foreseen the fifteen years of sanguinary fighting with which the century began. Nay, if in some prophetic dream, such as Holy Writ describes, they had been unfolded before his eyes, he would no more have understood their meaning than he would have understood how men could speak to each other by means of the telephone, or send intelligible signals through the air by an invisible and immaterial system of telegraphy. But we have seen them. Their story is written for us in the chronicles of that Nineteenth Century whose epitaph is now to be penned. One wonders whether, having seen and learned, we have really understood-have grasped the true meaning of the lessons which the history of the century teaches us. A certain friend of mine, who is at once more of a philosopher and more of a man of affairs than I pretend to be, reproaches me at times because of my belief in the swing of the pendulum as a rule that influences, if it does not govern, the movements of public opinion. Yet I may plead in defence of my faith that the story of the last hundred years shows us the pendulum in full swing. The long war was followed by the long peace, during which the nation slowly recovered from the exhaustion that it had caused. Then, when our commerce had revived under the policy of free trade, and the working-man no longer felt the pinch of hunger in his house, there was a partial revival of the old passions, and we allowed ourselves to drift into the calamitous blunder of the Crimean war. That was but a partial and abortive movement of the pendulum, but a quarter of a century later it was in full swing again. With an ever-increasing commercial prosperity, and with the completion of the work of the political reformers, men began to look abroad anew, the narrow interests of