the other day his latest pictures, like Turner's, were thought fuzzy and out of focus, though none could fail to see the exalted imagination shadowed forth through the tragicCrowning with Thorns' at Munich. Now, however, people see differently, having been educated by the strange pictorial output of recent years, so that the very indefiniteness of these last works has become an added charm.

One of several existing copies (Dr Richter calls it the best) of a lost portrait by Titian of a great lady and her son, gives occasion for a long and not unprofitable discussion about Renaissance portraiture and the portraits of Isabella d'Este in particular. An incidental statement calls for correction. Both Dürer and Holbein made portraits of Erasmus, but Dürer's engraved portrait, done at a distance of time and place from the sitter, was never accepted as good. Erasmus himself wrote some hard words about it. An authentic portrait of Isabella by Titian was copied by Rubens. A picture in the collection of M. Léopold Goldschmidt was recently published as the original, but Dr Richter thinks it may be a copy too. He says she is represented as an exceedingly stout woman of over fifty.' Fat she evidently is, but certainly not over thirty years of age-about as old, in fact, as the very similar lady in the Mond picture. Probably both alike are rejuvenated likenesses of the same sitter.

Examples of the Titianesque Polidoro and the Veronesque Giuseppe Porta and unattractive pictures by Parrasio and Lazzarini carry on the history of painting in Venice till we come to the days of the brave decorators Sebastiano Ricci, who worked in England also, and Diziani, employed at Dresden and Warsaw. An eighteenth century portrait gives Dr Richter occasion to put forward Alessandro, son of Pietro Longhi, as the real painter of the portraits ascribed to the latter. Venetian landscapes by Carlevaris and his follower, the great Antonio Canale, and one interior by Guardi bring examples of the art of Venice down to within a very few years of the end of the Republic and the disastrous destruction of her ancient, picturesque, and most precious institutions and ceremonials.

After these late men it is a pleasure to be carried back to the stately days of Mantegna. In the Imperator

Mundi' monumental dignity and classical repose find perfect expression. Scarcely less delightful is one of the most charming little Madonnas by that attractive painter Bartolommeo Montagna. The mother is so sweet and young, the knightly donor so devout, the landscape naïvely fantastic. It is the work of a young artist with something of the young Raphael in him, to whom it was granted in his youth to infuse the sweetness of youth itself into his works, so that in after years, to whatever heights of accomplishment he attained, he yet did not throw his early work into the shade. Girolamo dai Libri stands on a much lower plane. Dr Richter notes a resemblance between the St John on one of the Mond panels and that in Dürer's well-known Four Preachers,' the former of about 1505, the latter of 1526. Dürer might possibly have seen the Italian panel when passing through Verona in 1507, but it was not his habit to recur in later life to hints obtained long before. In 1526 he was full of his Flemish reminiscences, and the drapery of the Preachers can be traced growing under his hands in the numerous drapery studies made by him after his return from the Netherlands. Van Eyck and Matsys, rather than any Italian, inspired it. The Carotto Madonna is full of a modern charm infused into ancient forms. The portrait of Fracastoro by Torbido is precious both because of the man himself and the artist. Fracastoro was likewise painted by Titian and by Carotto, but both pictures are lost or remain unidentified. With Farinato and Zelotto we come down once more to the days of affectation coupled with elaborate skill.

A noble drawing of the Virgin's head for the Louvre picture by Florentine Leonardo opens the list of the Lombard school-a thing far lovelier than the actual painting in its present condition. Three thoroughly Luinesque sickly-sweet Luinis follow. Gaudenzio pleases less at first, but holds us longer. He is here nobly represented by a fine up-standing figure of St Andrew. Yet finer is the 'St Paul,' by the little known Sacchi of Pavia, who, when he painted it, may have had in mind Botticelli's St Augustine fresco at Florence. To Sodoma two pictures are assigned. No one could reject the 'St Jerome'; but the Madonna' certainly raises doubts which Dr Richter's text does much to allay. No such disquietudes

are aroused by Boltraffio's admirable profile portrait of a man, who may or may not be the much-portrayed Casio. The work has a sculpturesque severity proper to a day when medal-portraits were fashionable. Giampietrino's 'Salome' is an unattractive rendering of an unattractive subject. The frequently repeated group of two nude children kissing, done after a Leonardo design, is here exemplified in a panel by Marco d' Oggiono. Is this the picture once in Lord Exeter's collection? The catalogue does not inform us. Flemish examples of the school of Mabuse are also known, besides those recorded by Dr Richter. One is at the Hague; another at Weimer.

The Ferrara-Bologna pictures are worthily introduced by a signed half-length 'Madonna' by Francia, the mystical meaning of which is made clear in the text; more important, however, are its high artistic merit and the distinguished classical reserve belonging to it in common with other works by the same master. Good works by Mazzolini, Garofalo, and Dosso Dossi in this same collection show how the next generation of painters sought for other forms of beauty, substituting romance for dignity and novelty of design for old traditional types. Whether it was worth while to reproduce the dreadfully damaged fragment of a fresco by Correggio is questionable. Every trace of beauty and almost of intelligibility has vanished out of it, and only a vague historico-sentimental interest remains. With a word of admiration for the pretty 'Marriage of St Catherine' by Scarsellino of Ferrara we must close these necessarily brief notes on the Mond pictures, which, owing to the generous bequest mentioned above, should have a special interest for our readers. W. M. CONWAY.

Art. 3.-THE CENSORSHIP OF PLAYS.

Report from the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship); together with the proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence, and appendices. His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1909.

ONE day in October 1907 there appeared in the Times' a very remarkable document. Seventy-one authors, male and female, had joined in a letter of protest. Suppose that a stranger to the facts were shown the list of signatures without the letter and told that the protesters included, without a single important exception, all the greatest living writers of English fiction, poetry, and drama, from Meredith, Swinburne, and Hardy, to striplings who had not yet passed beyond the stage of being called brilliant; he would certainly declare that only some flagrant act of gross injustice, newly committed or threatened, could explain the wonderful unanimity of men (and authors) so different in age, ideals and achievement. Suppose, on the other hand, that passages of the letter were read to him and the signatories' names concealed. He would find that the protest was aimed not at a single action but at the existence of an office: 'An office autocratic in procedure, opposed to the spirit of the Constitution, contrary to common justice and to common sense. . . . The power lodged in the hands of a single official-who judges without a public hearing, and against whose dictum there is no appeal-to cast a slur on the good name and destroy the means of livelihood of any member of an honourable calling. . . . .' The menace hanging over every one who follows that calling of having his work, and the proceeds of his work, destroyed at a pen's stroke by the arbitrary action of a single official neither responsible to Parliament nor amenable to law . . . an office which denies to the members of that calling the position enjoyed under the law by every other citizen.' These men must be the vilest of criminals; so far from being 'honourable,' their calling must be so dishonourable, so dangerous to the public welfare, that they do not deserve the rights of citizens. But why, our stranger would ask,

does not the State stamp out their calling altogether? Have we no prisons, no means of capital punishment? Were we to reveal to him that these dangerous persons are only writers of plays, he would imagine the government to have fallen into the hands of school-boys, who had created this absurd office after reading scraps of Plato's Republic' in a crib.

So far we have withheld from our stranger the clue to the puzzle. The reason why so strange a state of things exists, and why it arouses so little opposition or surprise in the general public, is one which is common in an old country. What has existed for a long time is apt to appear part of the order of Nature. The office of Licenser of Plays is nearly two hundred years old in its present form; its conception dates back to Henry VII. The time will come, perhaps, when some Mr Chainmail of the future will be heard lamenting its abolition. It was not a picturesque office, nor in itself a venerable office; there was no state or pageantry connected with it; its duties were unsavoury, the inspection of nuisances; it was, without doubt, in principle grossly unjust, and in practice mainly futile, often ridiculous and sometimes offensive. But it survived by many years every other specimen of the class of secret and final tribunals to which it belonged; it carried a flavour of medievalism into the twentieth century; it was almost worth preservation as the solitary example of pure tyranny that England had to show. And it will be necessary for our stranger to catch something of Mr Chainmail's point of view, and to understand the English way of achieving liberty, before he can realise that, though the office is all that objectors declare it to be, there is no immediate likelihood of its being abolished.

The historical point of view is essential to any consideration of the facts. It is commonly known that Henry Fielding's attacks on Walpole and his ministry, produced at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, led to the passing of the Licensing Act of 1737. Part of this Act prohibited, under a penalty of 50l. for each performance, recoverable from every person engaged in it, the acting for gain of any play or theatrical performance not sanctioned by letters-patent from the Crown or licensed by the Lord Chamberlain; and ordered that