bitter herbs for the Passover when He was twelve years old; and that of the Magdalen leaving her companions to come to Him; these, together with all the mythic scenes which he painted from the Vita Nuova and Paradiso of Dante, are of quite imperishable power and value as also many of the poems to which he gave up part of his painter's strength. Of Holman Hunt's 'Light of the World,' and 'Awakening Conscience,' I have publicly spoken and written, now for many years, as standard in their kind: the study of sunset on the Egean, lately placed by me in the schools of Oxford, is not less authoritative in landscape, so far as its aim extends.

But the School represented by the third painting, 'The Bridal,' is that into which the greatest masters of all ages are gathered, and in which they are walled round as in Elysian fields, unapproachable but by the reverent and loving souls, in some sort already among the Dead. They interpret to those of us who can read them, so far as they already see and know, the things that are for ever. Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies they shall fail-tongues, they shall cease-knowledge, it shall vanish.'

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And the one message they bear to us is the commandment of the Eternal Charity. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and thy neighbour as thyself. As thyself-no more, even the dearest of neighbours.

'Therefore let every man see that he love his wife even as himself." No more else she has become an idol, not a fellow-servant; a creature between us and our Master.

And they teach us that what higher creatures exist between Him and us, we are also bound to know, and to love in their place and state, as they ascend and descend on the stairs of their watch and ward.

The principal masters of this faithful religious school in painting, known to me, are Giotto, Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Luini, and Carpaccio; but for a central illustration of their mind, I take that piece of work by the sculptor of Quercia of which some shadow of representation, true to an available degree, is within reach of my reader.

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This sculpture is central in every respect; being the last Florentine work in which the proper form of the Etruscan tomb is preserved, and the first in which all right Christian sentiment respecting death is embodied. It is perfectly severe in classical tradition, and perfectly frank in concession to the passions of existing life. It submits to all the laws of the past, and expresses all the hopes of the future.

James of Quercia: see the rank assigned to this master in Ariadne Florentina, p. 45. The best photographs of the monument are, I believe, those published by the Arundel Society: of whom I would very earnestly request that if ever they quote Modern Painters, they would not interpolate its text with unmarked parentheses of modern information such as emblem of conjugal fidelity.' I must not be made to answer for either the rhythm, or the contents, of sentences thus manipulated.

Now every work of the great Christian schools expresses primarily, conquest over death; conquest not grievous, but absolute and serene; rising with the greatest of them, into rapture.

But this, as a central work, has all the peace of the Christian Eternity, but only in part its gladness. Young children wreathe round the tomb a garland of abundant flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, yet sleeps; the time is not yet come for her to be awakened out of sleep. Her image is a simple portrait of her-how much less beautiful than she was in life, we cannot know--but as beautiful as marble can be.

And through and in the marble we may see that the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth; yet as visibly a sleep that shall know no ending until the last day break, and the last shadows flee away; until then, she shall not return.' Her hands are laid on her breastnot praying she has no need to pray now. She wears her dress of every day, clasped at her throat, girdled at her waist, the hem of it drooping over her feet. No disturbance of its folds by pain of sickness, no binding, no shrouding of her sweet form, in death more than in life. As a soft, low wave of summer sea, her breast rises; no more: the rippled gathering of its close mantle droops to the belt, then sweeps to her feet, straight as drifting snow. And at her feet her dog lies watching her; the mystery of his mortal life joined, by love, to her immortal one.

Few know, and fewer love, the tomb and its place,-not shrine, for it stands bare by the cathedral wall: only, by chance, a cross is cut deep into one of the foundation stones behind her head. But no goddess statue of the Greek cities, no nun's image among the cloisters of Apennine, no fancied light of angel in the homes of heaven, has more divine rank among the thoughts of men.

In so much as the reader can see of it, and learn, either by print or cast, or beside it; (and he would do well to stay longer in that transept than in the Tribune at Florence), he may receive from it, unerring canon of what is evermore Lovely and Right in the dealing of the Art of Man with his fate, and his passions. Evermore lovely, and right. These two virtues of visible things go always hand in hand: but the workman is bound to assure himself of his Rightness first; then the loveliness will come.

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And primarily, from this sculpture, you are to learn what a 'Master' is. Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time! Unaccusably ;-none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a fault here! Dog-fancier, cobbler, tailor, or churl, look here'says Master Jacopo-look! I know what a brute is, better than I know what a silken tassel is-what a leathern belt isAlso, what a woman is; and also—what a Law of God is, if you care to know.' This it is, to be a Master.

you,

I foolishly, in Modern Painters, used the generic word 'hound' to make my sentence prettier. He is a flat-nosed bulldog.

Then secondly-you are to note that with all the certain rightness of its material fact, this sculpture still is the Sculpture of a Dream. Ilaria is dressed as she was in life. But she never lay so on her pillow; nor so, in her grave. Those straight folds, straightly laid as a snowdrift, are impossible;-known by the Master to be so-chiselled with a hand as steady as an iron beam, and as true as a ray of light-in defiance of your law of Gravity to the Earth. That law prevailed on her shroud, and prevails on her dust: but not on herself, nor on the Vision of her.

Then thirdly, and lastly. You are to learn that the doing of a piece of Art such as this is possible to the hand of Man just in the measure of his obedience to the laws which are indeed over his heart, and not over his dust: primarily, as I have said, to that great one, 'Thou shalt Love the Lord thy God.' Which command is straight and clear; and all men may obey it if they will,- so only that they be early taught to know Him.

And that is precisely the piece of exact Science which is not taught at present in our Board Schools-so that, although my friend, with whom I was staying, was not himself, in the modern sense, ill-educated; neither did he conceive me to be so,-he yet thought it good for himself and me to have that Inscription, Lord, teach us to Pray' illuminated on the house wall-if perchance either he or I could yet learn what John (when he still had his head) taught his Disciples.

But alas, for us only at last, among the people of all ages and in all climes, the lesson has become too difficult; and the Father of all, in every age, in every clime adored, is Rejected of science, as an Outside Worker, in Cockneydom of the nineteenth century.

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Rejected of Science: well; but not yet, not yet-by the men who can do, as well as know. And though I have neither strength nor time, nor at present the mind to go into any review of the work done by the Third and chief School of our younger painters, headed by Burne Jones; and though I know its faults, palpable enough, like those of Turner, to the poorest sight; and though I am discouraged in all its discouragements, I still hold in fulness to the hope of it in which I wrote the close of the third lecture I ever gave in Oxford-of which I will ask the reader here in conclusion to weigh the words, set down in the days of my best strength, so

• It would be utterly vain to attempt any general account of the works of this painter, unless I were able also to give abstract of the subtlest mythologies of Greek worship and Christian romance. Besides, many of his best designs are pale pencil drawings like Florentine engravings, of which the delicacy is literally invisible, and the manner irksome, to a public trained among the black scrabblings of modern woodcutter's and etcher's prints. I will only say that the single series of these pencil-drawings, from the story of Psyche, which I have been able to place in the schools of Oxford, together with the two coloured beginnings from the stories of Jason and Alcestis, are, in my estimate, quite the most precious gift, not excepting even the Loire series of Turners, in the ratified acceptance of which my University has honoured with some fixed memorial the aims of her first Art-Teacher. 4 B

VOL. IV.-No. 22.

far as I know; and with the uttermost care given to that inaugural Oxford work, to speak only that which I did know.'

Think of it, and you will find that so far from art being immoral, little else except art is moral;-that life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality and for the words "good" and "wicked," used of men, you may almost substitute the words "Makers" or "Destroyers."

'Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity of the world is, so far as our present knowledge extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of good, but having assigned to it a certain inevitable sequence of destruction and of sorrow.

"Its stress is only the stress of wandering storm; its beauty the hectic of plague: and what is called the history of mankind is too often the record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading of the leprosy. But underneath all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the midst of it, the work of every man, "qui non accepit in vanitatem animam suam," endures and prospers; a small remnant or green bud of it prevailing at last over evil. And though faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground; by the help of their joined hands the order of all things is surely sustained and vitally expanded, and although with strange vacillation, in the eyes of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also the night, there is no hour of human existence that does not draw on towards the perfect day.

'And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that the beauty of Holiness must be in labour as well as in rest. Nay! more, if it may be, in labour; in our strength, rather than in our weakness; and in the choice of what we shall work for through the six days, and may know to be good at their evening time, than in the choice of what we pray for on the seventh, of reward or repose. With the multitude that keep holiday, we may perhaps sometimes vainly have gone up to the house of the Lord, and vainly there asked for what we fancied would be mercy; but for the few who labour as their Lord would have them, the mercy needs no seeking, and their wide home no hallowing. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow them, all the days of their life, and they shall dwell in the house of the Lord-For Ever.'

JOHN RUSKIN.

THE FUTURE OF INDIA.

SPECULATION as to the political future is not a very fruitful occupation. In looking back to the prognostications of the wisest statesmen, it will be observed that they were as little able to foresee what was to come a generation or two after their death, as the merest dolt amongst their contemporaries. The Whigs at the beginning of the last century thought that the liberties of Europe would disappear if a prince of the House of Bourbon were securely fixed on the throne of Spain. The Tories in the last quarter of that century considered that if England lost her American provinces she would sink into the impotence of the Dutch Republic. The statesmen who assembled at the Congress of Vienna would have laughed any dreamer to scorn who should have suggested that in the lifetime of many of them Germany would become an empire in the hands of Prussia, France a well-organised and orderly republic, and the 'geographical expression' of Italy vitalised into one of the great powers of Europe. Nevertheless, if politics is ever to approach the dignity of a science, it must justify a scientific character by its ability to predict events. The facts are too complicated, probably, ever to admit the application of exact deductive reasoning; and in the growth of civilised society new and unexpected forms are continually springing up. But though practical statesmen will not aim at results beyond the immediate future, it is impossible for men who pass their lives in the study of the difficult task of government to avoid speculations as to the future form of society to which national efforts should be directed. Some theory or other, therefore, is always present, consciously or unconsciously, to the mind of politicians.

With respect to British India it may be observed that very different views of policy prevail. Native writers in the Indian press view their exclusion from all the higher offices of Government, and the efforts of Manchester to transfer 800,000l. per annum raised on cotton goods to increased taxation in India, as a policy based on mere selfishness; and a Russian journal, apparently in good faith, assured its readers the other day that India pays into the British treasury an annual tribute of twenty to twentyfive millions sterling. On the other hand, some advanced thinkers