of the alumnus, even of ten or twelve years, how far away he has strayed from the sensations, influences, ay, and the ambitions of his college-days! It is given to very few to shape their own destinies; yet most college seniors, when they have put aside their last examination-paper, and made their last "oration," have already laid out a scheme of life, and it never occurs to them to doubt that it is the reflection of a certain future. It is often said that a college is "a little world in itself;" and truly enough it has resemblances to the greater world, such as its struggles, its ambitions, its gains and losses, and its schooling to manliness and self-dependence and self-assertion not a little severe and stringent. Yet many a student has been deluded to ruin, or at least to failure, by too completely mistaking the college-world for a lesser counterpart and epitome of that wherein lies his life-work; nor are the effects of such a delusion always the same or similar. One, flushed with the ready triumphs of the society and the class-room, flattered by conceded leadership, exalted by praises of professors and college-mates, rates his future success at too low a standard of effort; he thinks he will win as easily at the bar or in commercial pursuits as in class-meeting and on the exhibition platform; and, when he gets into the downright, serious hurly-burly, is amazed, and inconceivably disappointed to find greater powers rising hopelessly above him. Another, working till brain is overtaxed, and ill health is invited, in order to achieve college success, goes forth to plunge desperately into exhausting labors, plodding with shaken nerves far into the nights, comfortlessly and anxiously seeking fortune, and preying ruthlessly upon the faculties which alone can render fortune enjoyable when attained. Few and wise are those who learn to advance with deliberation, and vigor, and patience upon the path of life; eschewing neither lusty labor nor manly recreation, each in its proper time and place; remembering that "every thing comes in time to him who waits." One cannot but envy the cheery spirit of those youths who are having their last college merrymakings in these lovely summer months; that spirit is an excellent commodity to begin the world with.

THE woes of travelers on the Continent are not all imaginary, as an English party can testify who were recently arrested as "Prussian spies," far down in the depths of Brittany. The mayor of the village demanded their passports; and, on being told that passports were long ago abolished, doggedly refused to believe it, and had them taken off in a cart to the capital of the department. The wonder is that this worthy mayor, who, by-the-way, wore a blue blouse, and was fresh from the field, had ever heard of Prussian spies, such personages being much more modern than the abolition of passports.

Nothing could more clearly illustrate the exceeding ignorance which prevails in some parts of rural France than this incident. We once heard of an American being arrested in Brittany by a too-zealous official, who refused to believe he was an American, simply on the ground that he was white; the official was very positive that all Americans were negroes. The ability to read English is a quite unknown science in many of those parts, nor could any thing less than a peremptory order from the prefect secure our unfortunate countryman's release.

MR.

Literary.

R. E. C. GARDNER'S very decided literary talent, though it renders his books entertaining, and sugars the pill of instruction which it is his main object to administer, is not altogether an advantage to his work. It constantly leads him off into digressions which are often the merest vagaries, having the slightest possible relevance to the subject under discussion; it incessantly

distracts his own and the reader's attention from the matter properly before them; and the somewhat truculent vivacity, which is its chief characteristic, becomes a trifle tedious when indulged too liberally. His latest book, "Illustrated Homes," is an example of all this. Its plan is excellent, and it contains much that is really instructive and useful; but it has been almost spoiled by the extent to which the literary feature of the work is permitted to dominate and overshadow every thing else. Mr. Gardner's intention, as explained in a sort of prefatory postscript, was to take a dozen or more actual houses which he had helped to build, each one typical of a certain class or condition, and by giving the plans and a brief account of each one, and using it as the text of such architectural discussion as seemed appropriate, to make the book helpful to all who propose to build themselves homes. The plans were to be accompanied with specifications and estimates, general certainly, but sufficiently minute to indicate the finish and approximate cost of each house. The bringing in of the people for whom the houses were built was, of course, a subordinate part of the plan, and could only be done legitimately in order to give reality and, so to say, individuality to the different homes; yet, from the very beginning, these people (about whom the reader cares nothing) receive more. attention than the houses (about which the reader probably cares a great deal); while toward the latter part of the book the plans are relegated to an entirely insignificant place, and specifications and estimates are entirely omitted. No mention is made even of the material of which several of the most attractive houses were built or of their costthe very points which, to us at least, seem of most importance. Now, Mr. Gardner is a keen observer and a humorist withal, and his

*Illustrated Homes: A Series of Papers describing Real Houses and Real People. By E. C. Gardner. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.

sketches of character furnish very amusing reading; our criticism is directed simply to the fact that he has greatly injured by his manner of executing it a plan which, in its original conception, was admirable.

One other point, and we will have done with fault-finding. Mr. Gardner's main dogma, if we may apply such a term to teaching which is singularly free from dogmatism, is that a house is designed primarily for use, and that every house, therefore, should, in its arrangement, size, finish, etc., represent the needs of the particular person or family for whom it is built. The one customer that he cannot endure is the person whose notions of what he wants are based on an ideal conception of beauty, on what is "stylish," or on what somebody else has. In season and out of season he urges the principle that a house should be the expression of individual wants and individual tastes. Now, this is wholesome doctrine, doubtless, but it is somewhat odd that Mr. Gardner should be so evidently disposed to limit its application to details of interior arrangement. He is so afraid that the primary idea of use will be subordinated to a desire for show, that he

persistently discourages all discussion of the exterior appearance of the house, and finally says, plumply, that if a man "is wise he will leave questions of outside effect to the architect." No doubt it would be better for the average man, when he comes to build, if he should simply show a competent architect his plot of ground, tell him the size of his family and the extent of his means, and leave all questions, both of outside effect and of inside arrangement, to the architect's own jndgment. But, if he is to be taught that it is scarcely less than degrading to leave the number, size, and arrangement of the rooms to any one else, even an architect, why is his obligation to consult his individual preferences not coextensive with the house itself, in all its parts? In point of fact, a house is not built merely for use. Its outside, especially, is more conspicuous and more looked at than any thing in its owner's possession, and if it be known that it was built for or under the direction of the owner, it is inevitably regarded as a more or less accurate expression of his ideas of architectural beauty; his taste is judged by it. Moreover, Mr. Gardner's own plans show that by slight changes and transpositions, which do not af fect in the remotest degree the convenience of the inner arrangements, the whole appearance of the exterior can be changed, and that ren

dered picturesque and pleasing which otherwise would have been utterly without expression. We think, indeed, that it would be very easy to maintain the exact converse of Mr. Gardner's proposition, and to give plausible reasons why a man should select the general style and effects which he desired in his house, and (with certain reservations, of course, as to number and size of rooms) leave the details of the interior entirely to his architect.

With these qualifications, "Illustrated Homes can be heartily recommended. It inculcates sound principles of architecture and taste; proves, by examples, that picturesque, convenient, and durable houses can be built with very moderate sums of money, and

THE interest in the Bunker Hill centennial finds appropriate expression in literature as well as in orations, pageants, fireworks, and the like, and we find several pamphlets bearing upon the famous event on our table. Osgood's "Bunker Hill Memorial" is the best of these. Its leading feature is a poem of thirty-seven stanzas, by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "written expressly for this memorial," and giving a grandmother's story of the battle as she saw it from the belfry. The poem is written in the swinging rhythm of the old ballad measure, is spirited and vigorous, and illustrates very forcibly the patriotic enthusiasm of the colonists, which was shared even by the women and children, and the trepidation of the citizens who, for the first time, looked upon the bloody scenes of war. The poem is accompanied throughout with marginal illustrations, and is followed by an account of the battle in prose, by James M. Bugbee. This latter is also illustrated, and is the best brief narrative of the battle with which we are acquainted.

"the

Another and rather curious memorial is "Bunker Hill: The Story told in Letters from the Battle-field by British Officers engaged; with an Introduction and Sketch of the Battle by Samuel Adams Drake" (Boston: Nichols & Hall). The materials of which the book is composed have, as Mr. Drake explains, "hitherto slumbered in the archives of British regiments engaged on the field of Bunker Hill," having escaped heretofore the research of historians of the battle. Inasmuch as the British officers, without exception, claim a brilliant victory over provincials," their letters are hardly calculated to add to the enthusiasm of centennial time, but the patriotic fire of Mr. Drake's description of the battle readjusts the balance, and enables us to accept them with good grace as additional materials for the historian. The volume is embellished with a heliotype reproduction of a very rare English print, published in London in 1781, and giving a spirited view of the actual battle.-The description of the battle to be found in Mr. Frothingham's History of the Siege of Boston" (Little, Brown & Co.) remains the most complete yet written.

After the preceding was written, we received another contribution to the literature of the subject, by Mr. Drake, "General Israel Putnam, the Commander at Bunker Hill." This is not a biography of General Putnam, as its title would seem to imply, but a controversial pamphlet on the quæstio vexata as to who commanded in chief at Bunker Hill. It is an able and exhaustive analysis of all the known facts bearing upon the matter, and Mr. Drake evidently convinces himself fully; but of actual evidence there is very little, and the argument is scarcely more than an elaboration of the proposition that, because Putnam was a general and Prescott only a colonel, the former must have com

same field. The question has always seemed to us of the slightest importance, since it was the fighting of the men and not the generalship of the leaders that rendered the battle famous; and, as General Sherman said in his speech at the centennial, "after Prescott has received all the glory, there is enough left for General Putnam, too."

Ir is difficult to find a term exactly descriptive of Miss Lucy Larcom's "Idyl of Work" (Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.). To call it a "novel in verse" would be more accurate than its present title, and a tract in verse" would be truer still; but it is too slight for a novel, even though its lack of plot and incident is disguised under the forms of poetry, and it is too good (or perhaps we should say not "goody" enough) for a tract. An idyl of work it certainly is not, for, with a most idealistic definition of work, Miss Larcom finds herself compelled, in order to secure even the semblance of the idyllic, to ignore entirely the routine of daily labor, and carry her characters off to scenes and circumstances about as foreign to the experience of factory-girls as a jaunt up the Nile would be to laborers in a coal-mine. Thirty years ago the work in the Lowell mills was done almost entirely by young girls from various parts of New England, many of whom had comfortable homes, yet chose this method of winning for themselves a degree of pecuniary independence; and it is no wonder that Miss Larcom, recalling the memory of those days when magazines, of some literary merit, in which she herself made her first attempts at authorship, were both written and edited by the mill-girls, should throw over them the glamour of romance, and fancy that she sees in them ideal conditions of work. But all the same, as she confesses in her preface, the routine of such a life is essentially prosaic; and, though workers may find idyllic experiences during a summer-vacation among the mountains, work itself catches nothing of poetry therefrom.

It is plain, however, that the book was written with the object of proving by illustration that even the most exhaustive and monotonous labor cannot of itself deprive one of all opportunity for high mental culture and noble living, and also to protest against the tendency of the change which has come over the conditions and character of milllabor since the period indicated. The increasing degradation of certain forms of labor, the rapidly-widening rift between the interests of employer and employed, fill her with alarm, and she sees in them forerunners of national decay:

"Like the sea Must the work-populations ebb and flow, So only fresh with healthful New-World life. If high rewards no longer stimulate toil, And mill-folk settle to a stagnant class, As in old civilizations, then farewell To the Republic's hope! What differ we From other feudalisms? Like ocean-waves, Work-populations change. No rich, no poor, No learned, and no ignorant class or caste The true republic tolerates; interfused, Like the sea's salt, the life of each through all."

Of course the story in such a book is entirely subordinate, being of no use, in fact,

except as a thread to hang the didactic portions on; and no one of the characters has more than the faintest shadow of personality. It is the descriptive parts, together with the lyrics with which the narrative is frequently interspersed, that redeem the work, and render it enjoyable to the reader. Miss Larcom has written no poems more graceful, tender, and finished, than three or four of those scattered through the present volume, and her enthusiasm for natural scenery, and her skill in painting it, throw a genuine charm around the entire episode of the summer-vacation. The following song of the mill-children at their play would compensate the reader for whole pages of duller didactic poetry than Miss Larcom inflicts upon us in her most serious mood:

"Will the fairy-folk come back,
Such as haunt old stories,
Sliding down the moonbeam's track
Hid in morning-glories?

Air is warp, and sun is weft;
Is a rainbow-spinner left?

No; not one. They never will!
Streams they loved are busy
Turning spindles in the mill;

Turning mill-folk dizzy.
Toil is warp, and money weft ;
Not a fairy-loom is left.

"Noise has frightened them away

If we may venture such a suggestion concerning one who is possessed of so genuine a literary faculty, we should say that Mr. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen's new story, "A Norseman's Pilgrimage (New York: Sheldon & Co.), was written mainly to prove how thoroughly Americanized the author has become, and how completely he has mastered the details of American habits and character. The hero of the story is a Norseman, it is true, but a Norseman so Americanized that he feels like a stranger when he returns to his own people. The heroine is evidently intended to be a typical American woman; and,

tour very economically, yet without encountering absolute hardship, or demeaning himself by assuming the garb and customs of the peasant." Whether any one less enthusiastic and determined than himself can apply the knowledge, is another question. ton: J. R. Osgood & Co.)

...

...

(Bos

Or the late John Stuart Mill the Academy says: "History affords scarcely another example of a philosopher so ready to review his positions, to abandon them if untenable, and to take lessons from his own disciples, as the discussion, for instance, of Mr. Thornton's book on 'Labor' shows Mr. Mill to have been." . . . Professor Max Müller recommends young men before all things to study the original documents of the great literatures. "It is better," he says, to read Homer than to read a dozen commentaries upon him." . . . The Spectator, after remarking that "justice must be done all the more rigorously on favorites," says "the truth is that Mr. Black has made a sad step backward" in his "Three Feathers." .. Messrs. Cassell, the London publishers, have arranged with M. Gustave Doré to illustrate a complete edition of Shakespeare's works. Doré is to be paid fifty thousand dollars for his work. . . Mr. Allingham, the successor of Mr. Froude in the editorship of Fraser, is said to be engaged in the work undertaken by that gentleman of putting Mr. Carlyle's manuscripts in order. . . . The correspondence of Mr. John Stuart Mill, which, as we stated in our last issue, will shortly be published, contains many letters more theological in tone than philosophical. It is generally rumored that the book will contain passages, especially on religious topics, which are far more uncompromising than the boldest in the 66 Autobiography," and that they will in any case throw considerable light on various developments of the beliefs entertained at successive periods by Mr. Mill. . . . Messrs. H. S. King & Co., the London publishers, are about to publish a series of "Introductory Hand-books," to study which may be, at the same time, useful to those who desire to have a general outline of the subjects treated therein. They will not be, in any sense, cram" books, and are intended to be strictly what their name implies. The series will comprise introductions to the study of philosophy, music, art, English, classical, and foreign literature, history, ancient and modern, etc.

"Clever

people," says the Academy, "seldom write novels, they know the difficulties too well. People of genius, whose works deserve the most careful criticism, and people with a notion that they are great observers, and can tell a story well, have the field of fiction to themselves. With the works of the former class, which ranges from George Eliot to Mr. Black, the reviewer seldom meets; the productions of the latter are before him every week, the crude endeavors of young and old ladies, of gentlemen of leisure, these he gives his daily

·

dreadful line to.'". . . The Athenæum thinks

Ouida's" new novel dull. . . . The same paper speaks of Low's "English Catalogue of Books for 1874" as a work indispensable to reviewers, but an awful proof of the amount of misdirected energy that finds a vent in print. . . . The Saturday Review makes the following suggestion, which we recommend to novel-writers: "Our story-writers seldom do better than when they take some out-ofthe-way spot as the scene of their tale, and with the fortunes of their hero and heroine work up the every-day incidents of a life with which their readers are likely to be but little

acquainted. The more ambitious novelists who aim at something far higher than this, and who would describe the great world of which they know next to nothing, are like those artists who take a great width of canvas and some heroic subject, and produce a work vast indeed, but as uninteresting as it is unnatural." Mrs. Lynn Lynton is writing

a new novel, entitled "The Atonement of Leam Dundas," for the Cornhill Magazine.

WHI

The Arts.

HILE the public is kept pretty well informed through the press of the erec

tion of fine edifices in the large cities, comparatively little attention is given to the gradual change for the better in the architecture of the smaller places. Within the last ten years, probably nowhere, in proportion to its size, have there been so many interesting new edifices built as in the little city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. As we have before had occasion to remark in the JOURNAL, the peculiarities of fashion in buildings lend them a charm when the ideas that led to these peculiarities have passed by, and Elizabethan roofs, with their scalloped and pointed gable-ends, the gambrel roofs so frequently met with in the old towns of this country, and even the square farm-houses, with their big "stoops" overhung by elmtrees-each has a real charm and picturesque interest of its own, apart from any reference to the rules of pure taste; and these crystallized forms of old thought and old necessities appeal to us in a way different from any thing that is new, however fine the new thing may be.

In Cambridge, specimens of nearly every kind of building may be observed. The old college-buildings of red brick, plain and angular as the bricks themselves, without an external adornment, had, till a few years ago, when thrift destroyed the picturesque, tender tones of their old weather-beaten red walls, a great charm of color. The bricks were worn, and the sunshine flecked their unequal surfaces into broken lights and shadows. The natural color, which paint can seldom equal, had been broken down and streaked and faded by rain and weather till these old lodging. houses of the students were nearly as pleasant to look at, and of as varied a hue, as the red and yellow and purple rocks that abound along the sea-coast of New England. But a few years ago a general renovation did away with all this, and solid Indian-red, called brick-color, replaced these slight pleasant tintings. But Nature is again doing its work, and "Old Massachusetts" and "Holden Chapel " are beginning to "tone with the trees and the sky.

As you come into Cambridge by the horse-cars, the first new building which meets the eye is a Gothic church, built of blocks of blue-and-yellow mottled slate-stone. This church covers a large area, and its numerous porches and gables are edged by granite, this latter stone also being built in horizontal lines to the top of the tall stone spire. The chief material used is rather soft, but the granite guards all portions that are exposed to the weather or the corners

which might be worn away, and takes the real brunt off the low walls, overlapped as they are by deep eaves. The large windows with granite facings, where the stone might otherwise be much exposed, prevent too much surface of this charmingly-colored material from coming into contact with the weather. This church is not of better shape than is often seen in buildings erected within a few years; but in this, and in several other new structures, that variety of material we have so much advocated in the pages of the JOURNAL has been employed, and with even better effect than our imagination had pictured; for, though the general aspect is somewhat sombre, the gray granite which is so disagreeable in combination with brick imparts to this bluish building a cool and perfectly harmonious appearance, which the woodbine and ivy that are already quite well grown serve to enhance.

Beyond the college-grounds and near the old Washington elm, another church occupies a pretty corner, and in this case also there is a pleasantness in the material which makes the person who has seen it once desire to see it again. This building, like the other, is a Gothic church, and more elaborate in form. Two or three cloistered passages break the surface of its walls. The stone of which it is constructed is one of the commonest sorts of conglomerate, popularly called pudding-stone, and is found in great quantities close at hand in Roxbury. Each block

of it is full of the finest colors. Buffs of every shade, to the deepest dyes of ironore that stain the rocky coast of Massachusetts, are variegated by pink and flesh color, and they marble with their complicated network an under-color of purple-gray. Examining the blocks of stone piece by piece it seemed impossible for us to decide which of them might be the more beautiful.

A few rods farther on, off at another corner of the same steet, are the Memorial Church and two other college-buildings of the Episcopal Theological School. This institution, which has been founded within a dozen years, has purchased a plot of ground of about a couple of acres around the latelybuilt St. John's Church. It would be difficult to find anywhere a group of three or four edifices more pleasant to look upon than these. Sitting low to the ground and surrounded by fine greens ward, the church, which stands on the corner, is a small, lowroofed, many-gabled building, full of picturesque niches and corners, a many-sided apsis, filled with stained glass, and with its facings and trimmings of Nova-Scotia stone, with here and there bits of dark color and fine carvings. The irregular-sized blocks of the Roxbury pudding-stone make a sunshine in a shady place with their warm tones; old English stained-glass windows with pointed tops break the surfaces of the light walls into sombre tones almost as deep as shadow.

A little on one side of the church, and surrounded by heavy, close-cropped turf that fills the entire inclosure, another gable-roofed building of the same material varies from the church in effect of color by being banded and ornamented with red, rich lines and decorations, while the oblique lines that sup

port the roof are of buff sandstone. Big chimneys at the ends of this building, connected together by strings of brickwork, still further heighten its effect of solidity and comfort. Behind both of the edifices we have dwelt upon is another, containing some of the class-rooms of the college, which are of the Roxbury stone, trimmed with rich yellow free-stone and black; and, what one rarely sees in this country, a long, open cloister, surrounding the lower story, recalls similar places in England, where in colleges and monasteries students exercise and take the air, as monks did formerly. When there is so much weather in this country in which it is disagreeable to be in the streets-summer heats and winter snows and rains-we are surprised that these convenient and beautiful covered walks are so seldom met with. In early times, a thousand years ago, such pleasant walks as the old Gothic cloisters of Chester Cathedral found a place in English architecture. From the hot suns of Italy, the visitor takes refuge in the cool stone Campo Santos of Pisa, and of other Italian cities, broad, arched passages, built with their open side looking out on the soft herbage of the quadrangles of the old monasteries. High up on the hill-side, one of these long open galleries looks out upon the Apennines from the old convent of St. Francis of Assisi. In our own country, verandas, improperly called piazzas, take the place of these structures about our private dwellings; but, around school houses and public buildings where many people congregate, were they built broad and long and of stone or brick for strength and coolness, they would be a source of immense comfort and convenience, to say nothing of their capability of enhancing the general beauty of the buildings to which they appertain.

A chapter might be written on the baywindows, the attic-windows, and the porches of the new houses of Cambridge, and another on the chimneys and various gables of these buildings. One of the few pleasant points about the new architecture of England consists in the variety of shape and ornament of the clay chimney-pots of the houses; great groups and clusters of flues, massing into what have the effect of turrets and towers, are of different but harmonious variety of height and of many sorts of finish; and the same thing is true of the recent architecture of New England. The architects of Boston evidently have their imagination fired by the capabilities of form and of ornament of windows and doorways, and in a less degree of roofs and chimneys. One of the finest examples of interesting detail in these particulars is furnished by Mathews Hall, the last-built lodging-house for students in the college-grounds. It is built of brick, and is seven stories high, including the rooms in the pointed roof. It is so big that it will bear a great amount of detail without having the simplicity of its general mass disturbed by the numerous and beautiful projections that vary the surface of its walls. Trimmed with gray sandstone and black, light lines of this stone divide into horizontal sections the numerous high, gabled points of its roof. In the middle of some of these lines, the arms of the college-three

open books-are carved on the stone, and above the doorways of the open, pointed porches is the same device. A broad brick and stone uncovered veranda extends along the front of this building, and numerous groups of differently-arranged windows break the surface of the walls. The bay-windows to which we have alluded are sustained on brick projections, which support them from the lower story. At each successive elevation the sashes are variously divided - now into groups of two or three windows with flat tops; again they are pointed, and occasionally one big window-frame, or a number of lance-shaped little ones, gives variety and picturesqueness to the whole of the vertical projection. The forms of this building about its roof are a striking feature. Here gray bands of stone form the edge of its pointed gables, and between them are little nests of dormer-windows, of many sizes and of pleasant forms. Rows of broad brick chimneys are supported by stair-shaped elevations of brick, topped by the same light stone used elsewhere in this structure, and in many parts bricks set edgewise, formed into squares, diamonds, and various tessellated shapes, give an agreeable variety to the general picturesqueness of the edifice.

There are several other public buildings in Cambridge which form important new features of the place - brick spires and towers as charming as in the structure at the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue, in New York, where the windows, the different stories, and the ornament, if open to criticism, still show that the builders had ideas of form, and a taste cultivated by good old examples and by study. These, besides many blocks of stores and houses, mark the present as distinctly a new period in the architectural taste of Eastern Massachusetts. The great fire of Boston afforded an almost unexampled opportunity for the reconstruction of an important section of a populous city, at once wealthy and cultivated, an opportunity which its architects, educated abroad and trained by the study of Ruskin, as well as their own natural impulses to honesty of motive and refinement of feeling, hastened to improve. The building up of the new lands that cover the Back Bay in Boston with an extension of Beacon Street, and houses of a class similar to those in that street, have also afforded a fine opportunity for the taste of the architects-a taste developed by the chance for so many practical experiments to such a degree as bids fair to give Boston front rank among American cities in the art of architecture.

WE understand that a movement is on foot among the Academicians to give a painting by each of them to raise a fund for the benefit of the schools of the National Academy, which are greatly in need of funds.

It is a question of a good deal of importance in the interest of American art whether painting, composition, and the life classes can be efficiently managed, or if this leading school of America shall settle down upon the basis of a good antique class. Mr. Sanford Gifford, Mr. Huntington, Mr. Eastman Johnson, and most of the other old and

younger Academicians, we are told, propose to practically solve the difficulty in this way; for, with larger funds to employ competent artists as teachers, the high success of the National Academy schools is not an open question; and we can but commend this generous and practical scheme of the artists as one which, if carried out, cannot fail to do great good.

vura.

FORTUNY'S "Bull-Fight" at the exhibition of the Society of French Artists, in London, the Academy says, is "an astounding piece of braIt must no doubt be accepted as a mere sketch or dabbing-in of the subject, and as such it shows a fury of execution, an amount of point, certainty, and facility, enough to make the most accomplished painters open their eyes. One might even suppose it to have been jotted down as it stands during the To see it is to beperformance in the arena. lieve in it; but no words of ours could realize to the reader's mind the whirl of its action, and the chaos of its precision." ... "It is curious," says the Saturday Review, writing of Miss Thompson's battle-picture at the Royal Academy, "to observe how the fighting propensities of man-and in these times, when equal rights are claimed, we must add of woman also find not only gratification, but occasion for exercise, in these battle-pictures. The other day so tumultuous was the crowd gathered before Miss Thompson's dramatic representation of The Twenty-eighth Regiment at Quatre-Bras' that a struggle almost amounting to a combat ensued, in which ladies took part, one of them being driven bodily, with an audible collision, against the bayonets of the soldiers in the front rank." . . . The Athenæum thinks of "the equestrian statue of Jeanne d'Arc, set up a year or two ago in Paris, that notwithstanding its defects, which are, however, rather sins against convention than serious demerits, there can be no doubt that it is a striking and spirited example of modern sculpture in bronze." This statue, to our mind, is ridiculously bad; had it been set up in New York by an American artist, it would be pointed at universally as convincing proor of our national inferiority in the arts. "In accordance," says the Athenæum, “with a practice we have several times admired, the French have set up in the Champs-Elysées another statue, which is intended for exportation. This work represents Norodom I.. King of Cambogia, at full size, on horseback, and it is a portrait to the life of the monarch, but unfortunately in a modern European general's dress, cocked hat in hand. It is the work of M. Eude, and a capital specimen of picturesque sculpture, and full of spirit." We hope this opinion of the Athenæum's is no more sound than that on the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, just quoted. .. A contemporary makes mention of three new pictures under way by Mr. B. F. Reinhart. One is a conception of Columbia. "The young lady has a star upon her forehead and a crown of leaves within her hand. She has on the conventional clothing, in quantity contrasting forcibly with the amount worn by Columbia's daughters. About her feet are the emblems of her sovereignty. The Return of the Queen of the Faries' is another work by Mr. Reinhart. A pensive-looking young creature, supplied with feet, but superior to them, floats above the green grass attended by a train of maidens, her fairy companions. These glide gayly along in couples with their little wings spread, and on either side are cherubic loves leading