knowledge and feeling of the author; and the public, either conversant with those facts or capable of being satisfied of them without much thought, abandoned itself to the fascination of his eloquence and acquiesced in his teachings, or arrayed itself in utter hostility to him and his new ideas. The second volume was more abstruse and deeper in feeling, and comparatively few of Mr. Ruskin's followers through the first cared to get entangled in the metaphysical mazes of the second, and it is generally neglected, although containing some of the deepest and most satisfactory studies on the fundamental principles of art and taste which have ever been printed.

The third and fourth volumes, coming up again nearer the surface, made an application of the principles investigated to the material for art which Nature furnishes; and here again the author found in part his audience diminished among those who had at first been carried away by his enthusiasm or silenced and convinced by his unhesitating dogmatism. A partial reaction took place, owing not only to the change in the tone of the "Modern Painters," but to the springing up of a new school of painting, the consequence, mainly and legitimately, of the teachings of the work, the pre-Raphaelite, which, at once attacked virulently and immeasurably by the old school of critics, and defended as earnestly by Mr. Ruskin, became the subject of the war which was still waged between him and them. Turner in the meanwhile had passed away and was admitted to apotheosis, the malignant critics of yesterday becoming the ignorant adulators of to-day his position was conceded, but the hostility to Ruskin was sustained with unabated bitterness on the new field. was demolished anew, and proved, many useless times over and over, an ignorant pretender; the public in the meanwhile, even his opponents, taking up in turn his protégés, as he pointed them out to their notice. The effect of his criticisms in enhancing the value of the works they approved would be incredible, if one did not know how glad an English public is to be led. As a single instance, - a drawing which was sold from one of the water-color exhibitions at fifty guineas, sold again, after Ruskin's notice, at two hundred and fifty; and in the lists of pictures sold or to be sold at auction, one sees constantly,

He

"Noticed by Mr. Ruskin," "Approved by Mr. Ruskin," appended to the title.

The third volume, being devoted to the correction of the ideas of Style and the Ideal, to Finish, and a review of the Past Landscape-Painting, recurs to Turner in its closing chapter, "On his Teachers"; the fourth was given to Mountain Beauty, following the parallel of the first, which treated of the Truth of Mountains, and bearing as its burden of moral the expression of that Ideal by Turner; and the fifth now comes to conclude the investigations on the Ideal by chapters: first, on "Leaf Beauty," an exceedingly interesting investigation of the development of the forms of trees and plants as concerned with the laws of beauty; second, "Cloud Beauty"; and then of the "Ideas of Relation," in which the author comes finally to the demonstration of the right of Turner to his position amongst the thinking and poetic painters.

From the first division, "Leaf Beauty," we must make one extract. The author has been speaking of the influence of the Pine on Swiss character.

"But the point which I desire the reader to note is, that the character of the scene which, if any, appears to have been impressive to the inhabitant is not that which we ourselves feel when we enter the district. It was not from their lakes, nor their cliffs, nor their glaciers, though these were all peculiarly their possession, that the three venerable cantons or states received their name. They were not called the States of the Rock, nor the States of the Lake, but the States of the Forest. And the one of the three which contains the most touching record of the spiritual power of Swiss religion, in the name of the convent of the Hill of Angels,' has for its own none but the sweet, childish name of Under the Woods.'

"And, indeed, you may pass under them, if, leaving the most sacred spot in Swiss history, the Meadow of the Three Fountains, you bid the boatman row southward a little way by the Bay of Uri. Steepest there, on its western side, the walls of its rocks ascend to heaven. Far in the blue of evening, like a great cathedral-pavement, lies the lake in its darkness; and you may hear the whisper of innumerable falling waters return from the hollows of the cliff like the voices of a multitude praying under their breath. From time to time, the beat of a wave, slow lifted, where the rocks lean over the black depth, dies heavily as the last note of a requiem. Opposite,

green with steep grass and set with châlet villages, the Tron Alp rises in one solemn glow of pastoral light and peace; and above, against the clouds of twilight, ghostly on the gray precipice, stand, myriad by myriad, the shadowy armies of the Unterwalden pine.

"I have seen that it is possible for the stranger to pass through this great chapel, with its font of waters, and mountain pillars, and vaults of cloud, without being touched by one noble thought or stirred by any sacred passion; but for those who received from its waves the baptism of their youth, and learned beneath its rocks the fidelity of their manhood, and watched amidst its clouds the likeness of the dream

of life, with the eyes of age, for these I will not believe that the mountain-shrine was built or the calm of its forest-shadows guarded by their God in vain."

But perhaps that conclusion of Ruskin's, in the new volume, which will most interest his earnest readers, is that the Venetian school is the only religious school that has ever existed. So much has Ruskin's development seemed to contradict itself, that one is scarcely surprised at one conclusion being apparently opposed to the former one; but a change so great as this, from Giotto, Perugino, and Cima, to Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese, as the religious ideals, will, indeed, amaze all who read it. Yet this is but the logical consequence of his progression hitherto. If he commenced with a belief that asceticism was religion, he would recognize Perugino and Giotto as the true religious artists; but if, as seems to be the case, he has learned at last that religion is a thing of daily life, mingling in all that we do, caring for body as well as soul, sense as well as spirit, and that a complete man must be a man who lives in every sense of the word, then the Venetians, as the painters of the truth of life in all its joy and sorrow, are the true painters, and the only ones whose art was inhabited by a religion worth following.

It is interesting to follow what are called Ruskin's contradictions and see how perfectly they represent the whole system of artistic truth, as seen from the different points of a young artist's or student's growth up to mature and ripened judg ment; so that there is no stage of artistic development which has not some form of truth particularly adapted to it, in the "Modern Painters." If it be urged that the book should have been written only from the point of final development, it can

only be said that no true book will ever be so written, for no man can ever be certain of his having attained final truth. "Modern Painters" has value in this very showing of the critical development, which to an intelligent student is greater than that a complete and infallible guide could have.

The chapter on Invention is full of the most delightful artistic truth, and shows completely, by copious illustrations, how well Turner deserved the rank Ruskin gives him amongst great composers. The analyses of the compositions of Turner are most curious and interesting, but, of course, depend on the accompanying plates. Some most valuable mental philosophy bearing on the production of art-works concludes Part VIII., which is devoted to "Invention Formal," of which we quote the concluding paragraphs:

"Until the feelings can give strength enough to the will to enable it to conquer them, they are not strong enough. If you cannot leave your picture at any moment, cannot turn from it and go on with another while the color is drying, cannot work at any part of it you choose with equal contentment, you have not firm enough grasp of it.

"It follows, also, that no vain or selfish person can possibly paint, in the noble sense of the word. Vanity and selfishness are troublous, eager, anxious, petulant: painting can only be done in calm of mind. Resolution is not enough to secure this; it must be secured by disposition as well. You may resolve to think of your picture only; but, if you have been fretted before beginning, no manly or clear grasp of it will be possible for you. No forced calm is calm enough: only honest calm, natural calm. You might as well try by external pressure to smooth a lake till it could reflect the sky, as by violence of effort to secure the peace through which only you can reach imagination. That peace must come in its own time, as the waters settle themselves into clearness as well as quietness: you can no more filter your mind intopurity than you can compress it into calmness; you must keep it pure, if you would have it pure; and throw no stones into it, if you would have it quiet. Great courage and selfcommand may to a certain extent give power of painting without the true calmness underneath, but never of doing first-rate work. There is sufficient evidence of this in even what we know of great men, though of the greatest we nearly always know the least (and that necessarily; they being very silent, and not much given to setting themselves

forth to questioners,-apt to be contemptuously reserved no less than unselfishly). But in such writings and sayings as we possess of theirs we may trace a quite curious gentleness and serene courtesy. Rubens's letters are almost ludicrous in their unhurried politeness. Reynolds, swiftest of painters, was gentlest of companions; so also Velasquez, Titian, and Veronese.

"It is gratuitous to add that no shallow or petty person can paint. Mere cleverness or special gift never made an artist. It is only perfectness of mind, unity, depth, decision, the highest qualities, in fine, of the intellect, which will form the imagination.

And, lastly, no false person can paint. A person false at heart may, when it suits his purposes, seize a stray truth here or there; but the relations of truth, its perfectness, that which makes it wholesome truth, he can never perceive. As wholeness and wholesomeness go together, so also sight with sincerity; it is only the constant desire of and submissiveness to truth, which can measure its strange angles and mark its infinite aspects, and fit them and knit them into sacred invention.

"Sacred I call it deliberately; for it is thus in the most accurate senses, humble as well as helpful,- meek in its receiving as magnificent in its disposing; the name it bears being rightly given even to invention formal, not because it forms, but because it finds. For you cannot find a lie; you must make it for yourself. False things may be imagined, and false things composed; but only truth can be invented."

One of those cardinal doctrines by which we may learn the bearings of a writer's system of truth is that of Ruskin's of the intimate connection between landscape art and humanity.

"Fragrant tissue of flowers, golden circlet of clouds, are only fair when they meet the fondness of human thoughts and glorify human visions of heaven.

"It is the leaning on this truth which more than any other has been the distinctive character of all my own past work. And in closing a series of art-studies, prolonged during so many years, it may be perhaps permitted me to point out this specialty, the rather that it has been, of all their characters, the one most denied. I constantly see that the same thing takes place in the estimation formed by the modern public of the work of almost any true person, living or dead. It is not needful to state here the causes of such error; but the fact is indeed so, that precisely the distinctive root and leading force of

any true man's work and way are the things denied him.

"And in these books of mine, their distinctive character, as essays on art, is their bringing everything to a root in human passion or human hope. Arising first not in any desire to explain the principles of art, but in the endeavor to defend an individual painter from injustice, they have been colored throughout, nay, continually altered in shape, and even warped and broken, by digressions respecting social questions, which had for me an interest tenfold greater than the work I had been forced into undertaking. Every principle of painting which I have stated is traced to some vital or spiritual fact; and in my works on architecture the preference accorded finally to one school over another is founded on a comparison of their influences on the life of the workman, a question by all other writers on the subject of architecture wholly forgotten or despised.

"The essential connection of the power of landscape with human emotion is not less certain because in many impressive pictures the link is slight or local. That the connection should exist at a single point is all that we need. . . . That difference, and more, exists between the power of Nature through which humanity is seen, and her power in the desert. Desert, whether of leaf or sand, -true desertness, is not in the want of leaves, but of life. Where humanity is not and was not, the best natural beauty is more than vain. It is even terrible; not as the dress cast aside from the body, but as an embroidered shroud hiding a skeleton."

The volume, as a whole, will be found less dogmatic, calmer, more convincing, and more directly applicable to artistic judgment, than any of the others. There is the same love of mysticism and undermeanings, but freighted with deeper and more central truths: a charming conclusion to a fourteen-years' diary of such study of Art and Nature, so severe, so unremitting, as never critic gave before.

Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb. By W. W. GOODWIN, Ph. D. Cambridge: Sever and Francis.

GRAMMARIANS had once a simple way of disposing of the subject on which Professor Goodwin has given us this elaborate treatise of three hundred pages.

In the Greek Grammar of the Messieurs de Port Royal, which Gibbon praises so

he

highly in his charming autobiography, and which has passed through several editions in England within the present century, we are taught, that, "though the moods [in Greek] are not to be rejected entirely, yet their signification is sometimes so very arbitrary, that they are put for one another through all tenses." Lancelot himself seems to have had a glimmering of the essential incredibility of this statement; for, though he attempts to substantiate it by citing from Greek authors a number of passages in which the Greek idiom happens to differ from the Latin, passages, however, which Mr. Goodwin would have been glad to use, had they fallen in his way, to illustrate the regular constructions of the language, feels it necessary to appeal to the authority of the learned Budæus, the greatest of the early Greek scholars. Strange as it seems that really accomplished Greek scholars should have charged Plato and Demosthenes, speaking the most perfect of tongues, with arbitrary interchanges of moods and tenses, yet the same views continued to be presented in grammatical works down to the close of the last century. The transition to the new school of grammarians was made in 1792, by the publication of a Greek Grammar by Philip Buttmann, which, in the greatly improved form which it afterwards received from his hands, is familiar to all Greek scholars. In our frequent boasts of the great strides that knowledge has taken in the present century, we commonly have in mind the physical sciences; but we doubt whether in any department of physical science the manuals in use seventy-five years ago are so utterly inferior to those of the present day as are, for instance, the remarks of Viger, and his commentators before Hermann, on the syntax of the Greek verb, to the philosophical treatment of the same points by Professor Goodwin.

This work is entitled, we think, to rank with the best grammars of the Greek language that have appeared in German or English, in all the points that constitute grammatical excellence; while its monographic character justified and required an exhaustive treatment of its particular topic, not to be found even in the huge grammars of Matthiæ and Kühner. Indeed, not the least of its merits is this, that,

in addition to the excellent matter which is original with Professor Goodwin, it furnishes to the student, American or English, for we hope to see its merits recognized on the other side of the Atlantic,a digest, as it were, of all that is most valuable on the subject of the syntax of the Greek verb in the best German grammars, from Buttmann to Madvig, enhanced, too, in value by being recast and worked into a homogeneous system by an acute scholar and experienced teacher. One excellence of the book we would by no means pass over, an excellence which we are sure will be particularly appreciated by all who have used translations of German grammars, the precision both of thought and expression by which it is characterized, which releases the student from the labor of constructing the meaning of a rule from the data of the appended examples. Not that Mr. Goodwin is chary of examples; on the contrary, one of the most attractive and not least profitable features of the book is the copiousness and freshness of the illustrative quotations from Greek authors. These are as welcome as the brightness of newly minted coin to the eye which, in consulting grammar after grammar, has been condemned to meet under corresponding rules always the same examples, till they begin to produce that effect upon the nerves which all have experienced at the mention of the deadly upas-tree, or the imminence of the dissolution of the Union.

We must not omit to speak of the typographical merit of the work, and especially of what constitutes the first and the last merit of books of this class, the excellent table of contents, and the indexes, Greek and English, which leave nothing to be desired in the way of facility of ret erence, except, perhaps, an index to the quotations.

The Law of the Territories. Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Son.

THE author of the two able essays contained in this volume will be remembered by many of our readers under his assumed name of " Cecil." The second, as he himself tells us, on "Popular Sovereignty in the Territories," was published, as one of a series of essays on Southern politics, in the Philadelphia North American and Unitea

"Disunion is a word of fear. Is it not strange that it should have been as yet pronounced only by the South? The danger of insurrection and servile war belongs to the nature of slavery. It is, perhaps, not too much to assert that the safety and tranquillity of Southern society depend on the fact that the Northern people are close at hand to aid in case of need, that the power of the General Government is ever ready for the same purpose. Four millions of barbarians, growing with tropical vigor, and soon to be eight millions, with tropical passions boiling in their blood, endowed with native courage, with sinews strong by toil, and stimulated by the hope of liberty and unbounded license, are not to be trifled with. Take away from them the idea of an irresistible power in the North, ready at any moment to be invoked by their masters, or let them expect in the North, not enemies, but friends and supporters, which even now they are told every day by these masters they may expect, and how soon might a flame be lighted which no power in the South could extinguish!

"Law of the

the first con

Mr. Fisher treats of the Territories" in two essays,sidering more particularly The Territories and the Constitution," the second, "Popular Sovereignty in the Territories." The first commences with a quotation so happy that it has all the effect of original wit:

"The wily and witty Talleyrand was once asked the meaning of the word 'non-intervention,' so often used in European diplomacy. 'It is a word,' he replied, metaphysical and political, not accurately defined, but which means-much the same thing as intervention!' The same word has been frequently employed, of late years, in our politics, with the same difference between its professed and its practical signification. It was introduced for the first time in reference to the government of the Territories, when it became an object for the South to gain Kansas as a

Slave State. Two obstacles were to be overcome. One was the Missouri Compromise, which was a solemn compact between North and South to settle a disturbing and dangerous question; the other was a possible majority in Congress, that, it was feared, might prohibit slavery in the new Territory. Southern politicians had at the time control of the government; and they got rid of both difficulties by repealing the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. By necessary implication, arising from the relation of the Territories to the rest of the nation, by the language of the Constitution, and by the uniform construction of it and practice under it from the earliest period of our history, the Territories had been subjected to the absolute control of the General Government. By the Kansas and Nebraska Bill they were withdrawn from that control. The principle of Popular Sovereignty, it was said, applied to them as well as to the States; and this bill declared that the people of the Territories should be perfectly free to choose their own domestic institutions and regulate their own affairs in their own way."

The means employed to carry out this plan and the ultimate failure of the plan itself are sketched with a boldness and vigor that our limits, much to our regret, forbid our reproducing. Mr. Fisher, however, fails to notice the wretched plea put forth by the Democratic managers, in favor of the recognition by Congress of the Lecompton Constitution,that it had been officially authenticated. All might be wrong, but the official record pronounced it right; and behind that record Congress had no authority to go. And this plea was advanced in the face of overwhelming evidence tending to show that the officials, for whose record so inviolable a sanctity was claimed, were appointed for the express purpose of falsifying that record! If confirmation be wanted, we need go no farther than the fate of Robert J. Walker, who was cager to make Kansas a Slave State, but was so false to every principle of Democratic integrity as to confine himself to legitimate means to bring about that result,-a remissness for which he was promptly removed by President Buchanan! Mr. Fisher pertinently says,

"Two great facts were plainly visible through the flimsy web of attorney logic and quibbling technicality, not very ingeniously woven to conceal them. One of these facts was, that the people of Kansas were heartily