Mrs. George G. H. Lewes. [1846 second and third efforts, as compared with her first, suggests the reflection that, brief as was her life, its brevity may not have ill-served her reputation. "Jane Eyre" is after all but a glorified example of the "one novel" which everybody is said to "have in him." It is not quite certain that Charlotte Brontë had any more novels in her as great, or nearly as great, as "Jane Eyre" at any rate neither "Villette" nor " Shirley" has proved it. But this suspected limitation in her range may not unreasonably be claimed by her admirers as additional testimony to that truth, force, and intensity of this personal and almost autobiographic utterance which has raised it to the rank of a classic. Even as it is, however, she owes something of her fame to the pious labours of her friend and biographer, Mrs. Gaskell (1810-65), herself, as has been said, a novelist who came not far short of greatness, and whose "Sylvia's Lovers," a finer work than her more famous novel of “Mary Barton,” is one of the most powerful and moving stories in the whole literature of English fiction. A far more widely ranging imagination, coupled with a broader and more philosophic view of life than Miss Brontë's and relieved by a wealth of more genial humour than the somewhat acrid satire of Currer Bell, distinguished the genius of Marian Evans (1819 80), who under the literary sobriquet of George Eliot wrote her first and perhaps most famous novel, "Adam Bede." Its remarkable excellence was so immediately and so generally recognised that at least one ambitious admirer of it paid the authoress the most sincerely flattering tribute within his power to render by claiming her work as his own. It was followed two years later by "The Mill on the Floss," a novel of almost equal beauty and power, and in yet another year by the brief but admirable little idyll of "Silas Marner," in an artistic sense, perhaps, her finest work. "Felix Holt" was a less happy effort, and "Romola," a story of the Italian Renaissance, was, like George Eliot's poetry, an exercise on an instrument over which she had not the perfect mastery that she had elsewhere displayed. Middlemarch," published in 1871, showed her once more at her best; but from that date the influence of her long association with George Henry Lewes (1817-78), a man of immense intellectual versatility as dramatist, journalist, critic, biologist, and popular historian of philosophy, 66 1865] began to show itself in a disastrous substitution of the scientific or pseudo-scientific for the poetic and artistic view of human life, and in a correspondent and consequent depravation of one of the purest and most distinguished of later prose styles. Partly on this account, and partly through mere change of GEORGE ELIOT, BY SIR FREDERICK W. BURTON, R.II.A. (National Portrait Gallery. By permission of Henry Burton, Esq.) fashion, the fame of George Eliot has undergone obscuration, Kingsleys. [1846 Charles F. G. STEPHENS which should have been, but never was, awarded to Charles Reade, a romancer of true genius, whose "The Cloister and the Hearth" was by far the most inspired revival of a bygone European period accomplished since Scott. During most of the years when Reade's supremacy might and should have been recognised the first place in popularity was given to Anthony Trollope, a writer whose great vogue, as being one of the characteristic phenomena of the century, is reserved for examination in our concluding chapter. AT the date with which this part of our narrative begins painting of the more ambitious sort, as it was practised in these islands, was, apart from a considerable improvement as to its technique, and except as regards landscapes, very much as it had existed when Reynolds left it more than half a century before. In the interval Turner (whose lifework belongs to an earlier period), Constable, and Bonington (pp. 49, 53, 67) had, indeed, revolutionised landscape art, not only in England but in France, where the influence of the second of these masters was so prodigious that the superb and resourceful school of that country as it still exists is due to him. As concerns subject- or figure-painting, as well as landscapes, to Bonington all the world was, and still is, very much indebted. His great contemporaries, Delacroix and Delaroche, had in him an invaluable ally, who, being a worthy follower of the Magnificoes of Venetian design, helped with them to refound the inaptly named "Romantic School." What is called anecdotic painting, and the representation of THE TINTED VENUS, BY JOHN GIBSON, R.A. 1865] historical themes, came into vogue in the light of these modern leaders. The glorious mark of Flaxman was deeply set upon English sculpture; Chantrey, who died in 1842, was still potent in the same line; the influence of Gibson was indirect and losing force. Our best sculptor was Richard James Wyatt, whose Penelope," "A Huntress," and "Ino," a Greek might boast of, if, like Wyatt, he had lived and died in the Eternal City. The representation of beauty, and the divine tranquillity of the Hellenic mood, not the illustration of anecdotes, and still less of passion, were desiderata of the art of Gibson, Wyatt, M. L. Watson-whose "Sarpedon," "Eldon and Stowell," and Chaucer" endure any comparisons-McDowell and Woolner. These were the masters of the period now to be considered Woolner, in 1846, had not yet made himself known. The architects of the day were the accomplished Cockerell, the (1846-1865 Art in 1846. masculine Hardwick the elder, the passionate and learned younger Pugin, and the first Barry. The engravers proper were John Pye, C. Turner, S. Cousins, and J. T. Willmore. Lithography and etching were hardly flourishing. There was not much to say about wood-engraving: "processes" were nowhere; and miniature painting was in a good way, chiefly in the hands of those capital workmen, Ross and Thorburn. Painting. THE KNIGHTING OF HENRY ESMOND, BY A. L. EGG, R.A. As it is to painting that this essay must needs principally refer, it will be well to see how it stood in the hands of the above-named leaders. It will be remembered that the stupendous powers of Millais and Ruskin had yet to emerge, that Haydon had already, so to say, discounted himself, and that Wilkie, most of whose Spanish pictures were disastrous, was recently dead, although the effect of his success as a painter of anecdotic genre was encouraging to those who worked in the same vein of design. Mulready (p. 64) had become rather an object of admiration than a model for imitation. Leslie (p. 64), the ablest and best designer of genre, the subtlest delineator of beauty of the modern strain and what may be called Englishness then living, had twenty years before won high honours with |