The paper, which was unusually well received, was very fully illustrated by a variety of local idioms, and in the discussion which followed Mr. Sweet remarked on the great value of the dialect in preserving in a living form the old sounds of the w before such words as wrestling, wreath, and the broad aay in hay.

Prince Lucien Bonaparte said that the chief distinction between the dialects of West Somerset and Devon was the use in the former of the periphrastic present indicative instead of the inflexion eth; that West Somerset must be classed by itself; that the remarkable inflexion by which transitive verbs receive a neuter signification when used without their object, is found in the dialects of the South-West of England, in Basque, and in Hungarian, but in no other languages, ancient or modern.

FINE ART.

SIXTH WINTER EXHIBITION OF OLD MASTERS AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

(Third Notice.)

LET me begin by rectifying a double confusion in what I said last week about Mr. Fuller Maitland's picture of the Virgin appearing over her tomb to Saints Francis and Bonaventure (No. 187). I said it was "ascribed by Young Ottley, whose property it was and who engraved it, to Giotto; and now to Fra Angelico. Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle (vol. i. p. 589) pass it as the work of Angelico." Now there are two pictures in the possession of Mr. Fuller Maitland ascribed to Angelico. One is an Entombment of the Virgin, with Apostles; the other is this Vision of the Virgin over her tomb, with Saints Francis and Bonaventure (see Waagen, vol. iii. pp. 2, 3). Both formerly belonged to the collection of Young Ottley. The Entombment, really by Angelico, was engraved as a work of Giotto; not however by Young Ottley (that was my mistake), but in the Etruria Pittrice. The other picture now exhibited has not, so far as I know, been engraved. That it is a Sienese work of Sano di Pietro or Matteo da Siena is I think certain. When I said "Messrs. Crowe and Calvacaselle pass it as the work of Angelico," I had not discovered what is the fact, that those authors had mixed up the two pictures, the Entombment by Angelico, and this Virgin appearing to Francis and Bonaventure which I say is Sienese, and had described them as one. That they have done so is evident from the passage referred to, i. 589. Their book is so justly the foundation for all students following them to work upon, and their general diligence so admirable, that I am sure they will thank me for pointing out the error.

The Exhibition is strong in landscapes of nearly all schools, and contains one of the Venetian school which is a revelation. There is great charm in the two unnamed Venetian pieces of different hands contributed by Mr. Graham (169, 173). In each there is a pleasant mixture of romance with primness, of formalism with nature; with a pleasant enigmatic touch in the figures; which in the former case belong to the sacred order, in the latter to the profane or fanciful. But such minor items disappear in comparison with the landscape of Titian lent by the Queen (127). This, I understand, hangs usually in an imperfect light in Buckingham Palace. It requires a good light, and is worthy to hang in the best place in any gallery in the world. When I spoke of chords mightily struck by the most ancient masters in landscape, it was of this picture that I was thinking. It is not too much to say that whoever has not seen this picture has a great gap in his knowledge both of landscape art and of Titian. We are accustomed in Titian's figure-paintings, both Christian and Pagan, to trees of splendid growth and sweep, with a cluster or two of perfect flowers; to rich green boskage beautifully made out, and slopes and champaigns of the brown that shades anon into

solemn transparent blue, and distant mountainspurs among the clouds with shafts of light that strike down and touch their indigo into gold. In the Ariadne, the Noli Me Tangere, and the Virgin and Child with St. Catherine, of the National Gallery, we have in England three signal examples of this manner of his in backgrounds; and even in the present Exhibition, next to the piece now under discussion, there hangs a good though somewhat injured specimen (No. 126). But neither these, nor the best of the master's pen drawings of landscape, could have prepared us for the completeness and overwhelming power of the picture now before us. It is in Titian's most careful manner, and almost without injury; for I suppose the conspicuous seam across the middle could easily be set right. In the foreground, a shepherd follows his flock round a copse on the left; and on the right rises one strong tree-stem, and another not quite so near. We look downwards from a rise: first, upon a noble clump of trees growing on a swarded knoll-such trees and such a sward as you get in the park backgrounds of Gainsborough and Reynolds; then some bare brown ground a little farther off on the left, and a path leading down to a group of farm buildings. Beyond these a partial storm lowers over miles and miles of level woodland and estuary-a narrow dusky bar of raincloud stretching across the sky and sending dusky drifts of rain along the blue. A blue both in land and sky how solemn and profound! a dusk how sudden and full of menace! and how the distant church spire in the plain, which the shower has all but blotted out, seems now clearer and now fainter as you look! and how the farthest mountains, the sharp and slanting mountains of Friuli, stand out in pure air beyond the storm and against the white horizon clouds! For upon that solemn and profound blue of the sky there roll two strata of cloudsthe upper stratum pure and white and calm, and it is against this that the far mountains come out -the other, and this is the storm cloud, level and low and black. There seems scarcely anything which the moderns have attempted, in this order of art held peculiarly their own, and which is not here done with a strength, a majestic and full-toned poetry, such as even the greatest moderns have not come near. What is the good of words? The reader must take the picture by itself, and let it come upon him gradually. I say by itself, because at first sight it looks black upon the walls, being in a different key from anything else. Indeed, it is not much lighter than the same master's ruined picture of the Pesaro family at Venice. But look a little, and you will see how luminous this darkness is. The central point of high light is one curl of the white cloud in the left-hand part of the sky (and the mere manner of laying on this proclaims a mastery of the riches of the brush such as no other man has had). Everything else is kept down so as to come into right relation with this key-note. The light is led in masses about the sky by the reappearance of the white system of cloud here and there beyond the edges of the storm; it strikes faintly along the plain in gleams on estuary and meadow, a little more strongly upon the path, where two figures move near the cottage; it surrounds with a soft radiance the shadow which the great trees cast upon the sward in the middle distance; it winds about the copse in the foreground, lighting the fleeces of the flocks and the white loincloth cloth of the shepherd; its last echoes are caught in silver gleams high upon the near birch-stem and in the foliage beyond. Noble and beyond praise as a scheme of light and shade, consummate as a study of nature in poetry and in grasp, this landscape calls above all for admiration as a lesson in the magic of the Venetian colouring. In any other school colouring so dark would have been ink. Here is not a single opaque point; not a shadow, however deep, that is not full of inner light. The dense cloud lets through the sense of sky, the dense shower lets the sense of landscape through, in a manner that is nature's own.

In the sombre country beneath the storm, between the dim gleams of water, the eye can sink for ever into the softness of the darkened woods. The indigo and deep brown and dun glow upon you presently with a sense of I know not what wonderful gold and azure. And all this with a simplicity of touch as unhesitating as it is inexplicable. Human eye and hand never worked together with more imperial certainty for a nobler result. Is it worth while pointing out the few negligences of the giant?-that the figure of the shepherd is too short, that a dog chasing a deer in the middle distance is too large ?-that the sky and storm being evidently with the distant landscape the painter's chief point, he has painted the two treestems of the foreground so thinly over the sky that the clouds show a little through one and a great deal through the other? Let us be thankful for the chance of studying here-while we wish we had the chance of studying it always-so rare a masterpiece.

After this, the various phases of later landscape, for a long time to come at least, cannot but seem partial and incomplete. The art in the seventeenth century, which is the first century when its independent practice is common, seems as if its masters knew how to play only one tune each. In Naples it is an embittered scapegrace who has an eye for tortured rocks and shattered trees, the haunt of brigands and the outcast, and who rings the changes upon such scenes fiercely and impressively enough, if with too little regard for sober fact and nature. There he is (131)-a perfectly characteristic and vigorous Salvator from the collection of Lord Yarborough. The foliage, it is true, is more like seaweed than leaves, and the umbered glow which takes you is chiefly the result of age and varnish. At Rome we have two Frenchmen, Claude and Gaspar, who have taken up each in his way the classic spirit of the place. Claude loves misty light, the glow of afternoon, the poetry of decay, the sun of the Campagna setting behind distant lines of aqueduct, great trees that wave above embosomed temples, goats that dance among fallen plinths and capitals; or else he dreams of the statued wharves and columned warehouses of some merchant city of the old Mediterranean, and loads the gilded ripples of its haven with the hulks of impossible galleys. And Claude is here: one example of him especially which is among the finest and most glowing. I mean Crossing the Ford from Leigh Court. And here are three Gaspars, in his sterner and more pompous mood of the classical. In both of these there is poetry, a partial poetry, and of the mood which belongs to seasons of decadence and regret. We go north, and find in Flanders a poet of a ruder mettle. Rubens's landscapes, the best of them, seem to me among his very finest work. Give him his point of view-that the country is a place to hunt and hawk in, or every now and then to hold a gala or a dance; and as he goes out to his hunting or hawking or dancing party, his eye will take in as few others can the sweep and undulation of the country, the rolling of the woods and of the clouds above them, the sense of light and space and colour, the harmonious trending and transition of lines between near and far. This piece of Mr. Fuller Maitland's (106) is perhaps not as fine as the famous Rainbow, or even as the landscape in the National Gallery; but I suppose it is certainly by his own hand, and in the silvery grey green of its colour, almost uniform but for the single spot of red among the dancers in the foreground, there is admirable originality and subtlety of effect. A little further north yet, and we lose poetry of any kind, and come to one phase or another of patient, limited, meditative prose, perfectly exact and efficient in its expression. Or, if any of the Dutchmen touch poetry, it is Hobbema with his black far-branching trees and little glades or pools beneath them full of light, and red-gabled cottages beyond the glades; or it is Cuyp, the Northern Claude, with his afternoon suns, his gold haze absorbing all distant things in its gra

dation, his one or two strong foreground objects to relieve and give value to the rest. The Hobbemas here are not above the usual mark: but both Mr. Fordham's Cuyp and Lord Yarborough's (21, 145) are among his very purest and most masterly work.

To find the whole of nature attempted in art, as not Titian himself had attempted it, we have to leap a century and a half, and to come to our own school of England. Some indeed will say it was the ruin of the greatest English landscape painter that he did attempt the whole of nature, and would not be content without dashing himself against impossibilities. But before Turner became blinded with excess of light, and turned his canvases into mere mists of yellow and scarlet in the endeavour to realise nature's full scale of illumination and colour, how many things had he not conquered from the category of the impossible. The infinite labour of his homely studies and literal transcripts in early years, the training of the English water-colourist in mere topography, had brought him, with the powers he had, to an unprecedented command of the facts and details of outdoor nature. And it was presently his conquest to paint compositions of a Sovereign poetry, of a signal imaginative charm and power, and not to spoil the quality of these but to enhance it, by the fulness and multiplicity of the facts and details he knew how to put in with a science almost incredible, but with a perfect sense of mystery and subordination. Turner is well represented here with specimens of his manner in various phases. In my own judgment he is most delightful in that early specimen in which he is nearest to those of his contemporaries who sought above all things for breadth and generality, and were content with a simple range of colours. I mean the Crichton Castle, from the collection of Mr. Woolner (60). Nothing can be finer than the severity of the right lines of which this composition chiefly consists, with the sweep of valley and sunken river which prevents that severity from being rigid; nothing purer and more delicate than the tones of the plateau and the castle walls, nothing lovelier than the blueness of the day, in the sky, the stream which casts up the sky, and the shadowed places of the land. Look into these slopes of shadow, strong in the right foreground, fainter between the castle and the stream, and You will see almost the rich transparency of Titian, together with a delicate multiplicity that is already Turner's. No. 261, from the same collection, belongs to the opposite extreme of Turner's art, and is a dream of the unrealisable. Lord Yarborough's two great pictures, the Vintage at Macon (122), and the Wreck of the Minotaur (158), severally represent the master in a more central way. The former is one of the first results of his foreign travel: the country is not like Macon, nor the tones those of the Burgundy landscape at the golden vintage time; so far indeed from gold, there is a blackness rare with Turner, especially in the shadows. But few of his ideal landscapes are more nobly planned, or have a greater richness both in the artifices of composition and the mysteries of nature. The scene of the wreck, which has a good deal suffered, belongs to a class of his pictures of which the mind does not fail to recognise the enormous power, but from which I at least cannot receive any strong pictorial impression.

The greatness of Turner, however, is a proverb. What these exhibitions more and more bring out is the greatness of some of Turner's unconsidered contemporaries. In the first quarter of this century who would have been found-except, perhaps, Turner himself to recognise some of the finest landscape-painting the world has ever seen in the work of an obscure group of Norfolk drawing masters, who knew of nothing except Eastern Counties' nature, and a few Ruysdaels and Hobbemas? Who would have foretold that the works which then could not find a market would now give employment to a profession of forgers and

imitators? If there were only one example of the elder Crome in existence, the picture numbered 4 in this exhibition, and lent by Mr. Fuller Maitland, that would be enough to place him beside the first names in art. The amount of pleasure which the reader gets out of this Study of a Thistle may serve as the measure of his appreciation for the higher qualities of painting. It is as instructive as Albert Dürer's studies of plants and dead nature. The design of the plant, with its crisp rich curves and thorny points, is splendid; its grey-green colour of an exquisite depth and silveriness which Velazquez could hardly have beaten-relieved, ever so delicately, with a brown snail-shell, a red poppy, and a spray of blue flowers upon the background. Among the halfdozen examples of Crome's familiar landscapes, Norfolk common or oak copse, I do not think any here are of his very best. I think Nos. 51 and 99 below him in their somewhat empty dash and effect and ostentatious impasto. No. 215 is not by him, as the catalogue assigns it, but by a Frenchman, Georges Michel, who like him lived unknown and is now famous. The right attribution of this piece is obvious to any one who has ever seen the work of Michel; for all his work was in the same key of brown land and white sky, with the same broad vigour and generality of effect, and the same reference to some both of his Dutch predecessors and his English contemporaries. No. 116 has a magnificent skeleton of an oak in Crome's most vigorous drawing, a luminous sky of the loveliest purity and gradation, and a lovely peep of moist field and farm; but the pond and bathers have been put in (by Stark, as I am informed, another member of the school) in a different manner, and somehow break up the effect. No. 41 has at the left extremity a vista of distance through trees which is as rich and strong and solid as any Hobbema, with a poetry in which these English distanced the Dutch; but the rest of the picture seems confused and without composition. It is Cotman, the younger companion of Crome, and a little better known than he to the London of his day; who is strongest this year. He seeks always justness and harmony of effect rather than subtlety or fulness of detail, so that his work always looks its best at first sight, and is apt a little to disappoint you on closer acquaintance. But of just and harmonious effect he is a master. Like Crome, he used his vehicles with a force and simplicity the want of which has ruined the work of more famous men, while theirs stands as on the day it was painted. Nos. 27, 32, 42, and 235 are good ordinary examples, showing Cotman's masculine and refined way of dealing with sea and cloud, whether in calm or storm. 72 and 217 are more exceptional. The first is a study of one of those vast Atlantic waves that plunge over the rocks and rush unbroken into the cave of Boscastle in Cornwall. It is a mighty piece of wave-drawing indeed; and if it is objected that the copper sun on the horizon, with its bars of copper cloud on a dull greenish sky, bears a quite false relation of light to the wave and its foam, it may be answered that the relation was never meant to be a true one, and that the sky does but serve as a note of accompaniment, a suggestion of storm and disaster appropriate to these seas that plunge about the iron coast

Cotman is here altogether Turner. He is only not Turner by the absence of Turner's sense of multiplicity, by his way of forgetting particulars more than Turner did.

If these pictures of the Norwich masters show the prodigious and classical strength of English art at the beginning of the nineteenth century in holes and corners, the Exhibition does honour to another artist, whose work shows the weakness which was impending on official English art even at this hour of its strength. That is Sir A. W. Calcott, thirteen of whose works are here collected. In the days when the water-colour painters had developed to the full the resources of that medium for luminous atmospheric effects, and when Turner was preparing for that grapple of his with the sun and atmosphere, a grapple hopeless if sublime-in those days, from what causes we cannot here enquire, it came to pass that the English school at large forgot its colour. Alike in portrait, in history and genre, and in landscape, there arose artists whose light was chalk and whose shadow was ink. And one of these was Calcott. All his works, as you find him represented here, are full of conscientiousness and care. He is an excellent draughtsman in landscape. He appreciates, perhaps with a little pedantry, the beauties both of English and classical scenery. He is full of accomplishment. Some of his early works in this place are admirable in composition and conduct (Nos. 14, 150); though even here that chalkiness of atmosphere and light, that inkiness of shadow, assert themselves to a threatening degree. And in later work these qualities so much gain the upper hand that it is almost impossible to take pleasure in what he does at all. How wide-spread and how fatal was this obscure malady in our school, the loss of the sense of colour, how it has helped to vitiate and vulgarise our most ambitious art through a great part of the century, we shall have occasion to see at greater length presently. SIDNEY COLVIN.

THE FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATRE.

THE interior of the Colosseum now presents such a contrast to what was there beheld in former times, that, entering these vast ruins, one receives an impression absolutely new-one in which astonishment blends with a species of awe. Instead of the wide level area, with the high wooden cross at the centre and the painted stations of the Via Crucis under the stupendous pile of encircling structures, we find a rent and disruptured level, with an excavated abyss almost semicircular opening below our feet, along about two-thirds of the elliptic space, the rest of the ground being overstrewn with huge blocks of wrought stone, shafts of large columns (white and veined marble, some being of the more precious Phrygian and Carystian kinds), and broken capitals, the Corinthian moulding of which indicates the period of decadence. Descending by a steep path formed in the clay on which the upper area extends, we reach what is evidently the lowest level-the terra firma-where remains much of the ancient brick pavement in the so-called herring-bone style; the area below that stage, the arena properly so-called, which, as is now made clearer than ever, must have been a boarded platform.

phitheatric gradines and praecinctiones-that of the ancient podium, which, we now see, was supported by arcades, still extant, of massive stonework, the inner spaces of which are filled with brick that seems more modern. Within this structure, and distant from it a few feet, rise the ruins of another arcade, or rather a wall-curtain,

opening in high narrow arches, which alternate with arched windows, in two orders, on a lofty front of brickwork; this adjunct, apparently forming a second podium wider than the original one, being a confused mixture of large stone blocks and bricks, with a good deal of mortar. Within the distance of a few feet from this rises a high brick wall, built on the same elliptic plan, and within this, about equidistant, another concentric structure of similar brickwork, also elliptic so far as it can yet be seen. Within this inner circle the space is filled with clayey soil, like an alluvial deposit, at the summit of which extends what has hitherto been considered as the arena. At the southern side of the amphitheatre, where the soil has been, to a great extent, carted off, we see before us, at considerable depth, an extraordinary network of buildings, yet but partially made visible, comprising seven parallel lines of brick wall; and on the eastern side, where the scavi have laid a wider space open, these walls are seen to be connected by partitions, with low archways, all of similar brickwork (that, namely, of the later Roman period). These buildings resemble a cluster of small chambers, all now roofless. At the centre of the southern side of the arcades, which encircle the amphitheatre at a depth of more than twenty feet below the level, which may now be described as that of the upper storey, opens a great tunnel, or lofty vaulted corridor, built of regularly hewn travertine, which we may explore to the extent of about 300 feet. At equal distances from its mouth it is crossed by four lintels, or so-called "flat arches," examples of which are seen in the Tabularium on the Capitol, each of these before us formed of three enormous blocks (travertine), fitted together without cement. Four spacious quadrangular chambers open, two on each side, built of similar stonework, off this corridor. Exploring it farther we find that it emerges into daylight, beyond the limits of the amphitheatric buildings, and again becomes subterranean, from a point whence we may follow its course for some distance in darkness, only to be dispelled by torch or taper, till further progress is stopped by the mass of clay,

not

feras." Among remnants of art-works discovered in the long-buried ruins are some male torsos, Corinthian capitals rudely chiselled, and broken columns; also, more noticeable, several marble slabs, probably for wall-incrustation, on which are rudely traced graffiti of gladiators in combat, or in repose after such services, one with the palm of victory in his hand, others with crowns set beside them, and with names below. One graffito represents a hare, with a larger animal, like a tiger, probably one of those exhibitions of wild and tame beasts trained for certain feats which Martial mentions in his "De Spectaculis."

To explain the purpose and origin of the structures recently brought to light, at a depth below the other buildings, would be difficult, and, in the present stage of the scavi at the great amphitheatre, premature. Two epigraphs or tablets, still left where they have long been seen on the upper area, record restorations of the podium, the arena, and in one instance the arcades for entrance and gradines (portis posticis... et spectaculi gradibus) by urban praefects, in the years 439 and 486. In the sixth century the chase and slaughter of wild animals was an entertainment still kept up, being twice displayed under the reign of Theodoric, in the Flavian edifice. In the twelfth century the "Colosseum" (a term used, as we may infer, since the eighth century) was fortified and held as a principal stronghold by the Frangipani family, from whom Frederick II. took it, for transfer by act of Imperial authority to the Annibaldi, another baronial house conspicuous in mediaeval Rome. In the fourteenth century the Emperor Henry VII. deprived the latter of this unique fortress, and handed it over to the Roman Senate, which became thenceforth lawful owner of these vast and probably now much transformed buildings. In the grand bull-fight was given in the amphitheatric arena, for which occasion new gradines were erected around the antique praecinctiones. That proved a day of fatal pageantry, for many Roman youths of noble families who took part in the combats succumbed in the dangerous sport, commenced with pomp and gaiety. Many were left dead, several others stretched in their blood, after being seriously wounded, amidst the scene destined for festivities-as described by the chronicler and contemporary Monaldeschi, in Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script. In the pages of mediaeval records, or in those of the earlier vicissitudes through which the Colosseum passed between the fifth and fourteenth centuries, we

year

1332

should, I conclude, seek for a key to the

The

mystery before us, and so much that seems at first unintelligible and inexplicable in the recent discoveries. We may suppose that, as the exhibitions on its ancient arena became less atrocious and sanguinary, after human life at least had ceased to be sacrificed for barbarous sports, and the hired gladiator was no more "butchered to make a Roman holiday," those displays became a minor scale. also less splendid and on naumachiae, for which, no doubt, the brick pavement under the wooden arena was flooded, were probably discontinued from a period long before the fall of the Empire. For the spectacular chase, or slaughter of wild animals, a narrower locality may have been deemed sufficient; and hence, we may infer, was adopted the expedient of so curiously filling up with later and quite unsymmetrical buildings the great elliptic area now gradually opening before us in the result of the still progressing works that are revealing its long-concealed depths; hence the curious system of concentric structures, circle within circle, irregular arcades within the more scientifically planned and earlier architecture below the podium-an arrangement so contrary to all principles of harmony and to all proprieties observed in classic monuments, yet adding a new and mind-awakening interest to the attractions already felt for ages in the marvels of Rome's Colosseum. C. I. HEMANS.

NOTES AND NEWS. MESSRS. PILGERAM AND LEFÈVRE's new print, which is just out, is one of the most effective pieces of engraving we have seen for some time. The subject is Erskine Nicol's old Highland fisher and his boy, exhibited in the Royal Academy two years ago. The salmon-trout is hooked, and the perilous moment of landing it has arrived, when the cool and experienced old man calls to the excited boy who holds the rod, "Steady, Johnnie, steady!" which gives the picture its name. Mr. W. H. Simmons has employed all the various methods to give variety and richness of tone to the work, and has succeeded admirably.

a

ONE of the many interesting buildings of old Bruges, the Hôtel of the Guild of Crossbowmen of St. George, is about to be destroyed to make way for a normal school to be erected on its site. This is an inexcusable act of vandalism, as the fine old red-brick tower, with its vaulted staircase, dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century, might easily have been preserved and made to work in with the new buildings, if these were planned in the same style, a most suitable one for school buildings. Our Charles II. became member of this Guild in 1656, and used to amuse himself by shooting in its garden; a painting commemorative of a festival given in his honour on the 11th of June, 1656, formerly in the hall of the Guild, represents Charles suspending the golden bird to the neck of the victor in a trial of skill. The last remains of the Hôtel of St. Barbara, in the same street, built by a fraternity of musketeers, of which Charles was also a member, will probably be swept away ere long, this property having been acquired by the late Sir John Sutton, with the view of incorporating it into the grounds of the English Seminary founded by him, and for the permanent establishment of which he had purchased the adjoining convent of the Carmelites of Sion. The last months of his life were spent in superintending the restoration and enlargement of the church and adjoining buildings.

THE Danish painter, Professor Daniel Herman Anton Melbye, died at Paris on the 10th inst. He was the most successful artist that Scandinavia has produced since Thorwaldsen, and by sheer good fortune had risen to be the most fashionable sea-painter in Europe. Almost ignored in eclectie art-circles, he enjoyed boundless popularity, espe cially in France, among the wealthy and undiscerning furnishers of great houses. It was strange

that he should become the darling of the parvenus, since his personal character was full of eccentricity and waywardness, and his life marked by the most daring acts of adventure. He was born at Copenhagen in 1818, and began life in very poor circumstances as a ship-builder's apprentice. Tiring of this, he took up music as a profession, and tried as well as he could to subsist as a troubadour. This was enjoyable enough as long as food could be got by it, but at last poverty obliged him to look elsewhere for a livelihood. The sudden wish to be a sea-painter drove him to the studio of Eckersberg, then in the height of his fame. The old master encouraged and helped him, and in 1840 he exhibited his first three pictures at Charlottenborg. These had the good fortune to attract Baron Rumohr's attention, who introduced the young painter to Frederick VI. Melbye's fortune was made: he was sent in the royal corvette Flora to paint in the Baltic, and next to Morocco, where he took part in the bombardment of Tangier, and was nearly killed. 1847, having gained all the honours Denmark could give him, he settled in Paris. Almost immediately he became introduced to Louis Philippe, who took him under his special patronage. But in a few months the patron himself was not. Still Melbye succeeded if all others failed; that was his life's fortune; and in 1853 he travelled with the French Embassy to the East, lived nine months in Constantinople, and painted sea-pieces

In

The sentimental things have been remembered. Love has begun.

But then love-following its usual course-has begun in the wrong way. Violet Melrose is an heiress, and the baronet had mentally appropriated her for his son. Unhappily it is the son of the butterman who has wooed her successfully under the influence of those lamp-lit gardens and the quiet night at Hombourg; and the sprightly cousin clever and poor-who would have done very well for the younger Middlewick, has made her mark on the honest heart and dull head of the baronet's heir. Not that things have gone very far between them as yet: Charles Middlewick and Violet are more deeply committed. But the butterman is grieved that his son should ally himself with a woman whose alliance must separate him from his father--he has observed already her sudden involuntary disgust at the rough gesture, bad manner, and bad English-and the baronet is enraged that his son, who should take a wife from his father's hands as he takes his politics or his estate, should be making love to a witty sort of girl, who instead of being an heiress is only an heiress's cousin.

Open war has not broken out when the second act begins. People are still civil, if cold; and the

butterman and his son have been asked to dinner with the party at the older house. Here the crisis arises, for the baronet overhears his son

make a proposal to Mary, which is none the less serious because it is comic too. Sir Geoffry does not restrain his anger: he taunts and threatens to no purpose, and the curtain falls on the spectacle of two disinherited sons-Talbot vowing that he will earn his living along with his friend Charles Middlewick, who will defy his father's prohibition to marry the heiress, but will not marry her so long as the father's anger would leave him quite dependent on her wealth. "Our boys" bid quick good-bye to the fathers who have disinherited them, and to the girls of whom they have yet to prove themselves worthy. The boys leave Champneys Hall, and go out into the world together by the parliamentary train.

Going out into the world, to earn a living in it, on the strength of a little amateur's ability shown in literature, and the shallow experiences of the grand tour, ends in the third act just where we may expect it to end-in the "third floor back" of a very poor lodging-house, where the weekly rent-day is an occasion of only too keen excitement to a landlady who knows that her lodgers are poor. In this room Talbot Champneys is entrusted by a bookseller with the compiling of an article on Mesopotamia for a new Gazetteer, while Charles Middlewick having submitted to a publisher those poems of youth inspired by the starlight and society of Hombourg, receives a letter informing him that poetry is a drug in the market. Ill and disheartened, the young men leave their room on some errand in the town. It is the Cattle Show

week, and their fathers, yearning to forgive them, have seized the occasion to visit their rooms. Sir Geoffry is chiefly struck, when, under the guidance of the maid of all work, he penetrates to their deserted apartments, with the poverty and wretchedness of the lodging; but the butterman, who began life humbly himself, makes himself quite at home in the dilapidated arm-chair, and is chiefly dismayed by the quality of the provisions -the breakfast eggs never knew an English dairy, and the butter is from Dorsetshire. For flesh and blood this is too much-a room with peeling wall-paper for Sir Geoffry's son; a breakfast with second rate food for the son of a wealthy trades

did not plan; and as the sympathy of play-goers is on the side of youth and its illusions, everyone is contented when the curtain falls.

Such a slight story could never hold the attention of an audience during a couple of hours, if it were relieved by no display of character and enlivened by no sallies of wit. Mr. Byron is always able to command laughter easily: throughout the whole performance of his piece there is always someone laughing: now it is at a pun, now at an impertinence, now at a queer conjunction of words without meaning, now at a happy smartness, now at fun of a higher level, when the old smartness rises and kindles into brilliancy, to show us how well Mr. Byron might do if he chose. The piece is full of the dialogue of rattling farce; here and again broken in upon by the dialogue of pure comedy-stray contributions towards a literature that might live. The best lines in the piece, and the best delivered too, are those spoken between Miss Roselle and Mr. Thorne, when Talbot Champneys is proposing to the witty and penniless heroine. Mr. Thorne's half unconscious manner is known to be excellent, and it contrasts admirably with the not less excellent manner of Miss Roselle, who nurses, so to say, each humorous phrase, with evident intention to make the very most of it. Many actresses fall as the dialogue rises; but the sharper the repartee, the more pointed the talk, the better gets the acting of Miss Roselle, from whose various gifts for the playing of comedy the stage has much to hope.

If the best scene be this of the proposal made by Talbot Champneys to Mary Melrose, the best character is that of the retired tradesman, and this character-vulgar on the outside only and very sterling and sympathetic within-Mr. James plays with a force and truth which surprises no one who saw him in the last comedy of Mr. Boucicault's played at the Vaudeville. The self-satisfaction of new wealth; the pride, half-good, half-bad; the delight in a son who has gentler manners than his own; the obstinacy, which in another man we might call determination; the final victory of a tender heart, guided though it be by chiefly animal instincts-all these things are marked observantly, by Mr. Byron, to begin with, and then, very excellently, by Mr. James. Mr. Thorne, as I have indicated above, has many excellent moments, but this time his impersonation is denied the virtue of consistency; at least it is difficult to conceive that the lazy and unobservant tourist of the first act should develop into the shrewd hero of the third. No other leading character has much individuality. Sir Geoffry Champneys is a man you have met before, but Mr. Farren represents him so that it would not be a misfortune if you met him again. Mr. Charles Warner is once more the manly lover of Two Roses: now with no opportunity for The young woman with special distinction. money is played by Miss Kate Bishop; Miss Larkin makes nothing very new out of the part of Sir Geoffry's sister. The one new thing the thing we didn't know before-is that the Vaudeville has one more good actress in Miss Cicely Richards, whose parts hitherto have been insignificant, and whose part in Our Boys is chiefly remarkable by what she makes it. Not but that any experienced actor, listening to the reading of the piece, would have noticed that upon the character of this lodging-house maid of all work-fit companion for Bob Sawyer's servant, whom Dickens painted for us on his platform, inimitably by one and care. The part from the first undoubtedly was dull stare-Mr. Byron has bestowed observation capable of stage effect; but many persons, acting it, would have made it purely conventional. Miss

La Perichole is the piece with which Miss Dolaro will open the Royalty Theatre, this day week, we believe.

THE Lady of Lyons was found so attractive on two mornings at the Gaiety, that Mr. Hollingsfor a little while; and there Mr. and Mrs. Kendal, head was emboldened to take the Opera Comique as Claude Melnotte and Pauline, are repeating the performances which made the Gaiety so attractive. Mr. Ryder has wisely been engaged to strengthen the cast, in a part for which he is specially suited, and Mrs. Buckingham White also appears, so that the piece is well acted all round, and excellently as far as Mrs. Kendal is concerned in it.

MRS. CHIPPENDALE'S illness has caused the postponement at the Court Theatre of a long and repeatedly-announced comedietta-Maggie's Situa

tion.

Two revivals, promising a certain amount of interest, are announced at the Haymarket, for Saturday next, the 30th, by which time it is to be hoped that the now hardly tolerable farce of Lord Dundreary may be permanently laid upon the shelf. The revival of Home-the only successful piece which the late Mr. Robertson wrote for a theatre other than the Prince of Wales's—is not held to be enough to compensate for the withdrawal of Dundreary, so an exceedingly effective comedy, The Serious Family, will be revived on the same night. The change may not be an absolutely satisfactory one, but at all events it will be a change for the better.

THE Beggar's Opera now precedes Madame Angot at the Holborn Amphitheatre, and the Philharmonic continues to represent the most popular production of Lecocq.

A LONG article from the Kölnische Zeitung, to which the Times gave publicity on Monday, gives us an opportunity of seeing what a German critic thinks of the Hamlet of Mr. Irving. The German critic does not think anything very well worth reporting, though it is satisfactory to know that his opinion is at least on the right side. Having followed the great English actor over the track of his performance, the German critic ends where others have ended, with unstinted praise of the fencing scene. Isn't all this a little superfluous, when you have discussed a performance confessedly unique in our day. Mr. Irving fences well-be it so-but the ecstasies are a little misplaced. Well better; but your fencing master cannot act as he fences, your fencing master will fence still Hamlet, and that is what Mr. Irving can do, and what you go to see.

THE death of Grenier, the French comedian, is announced. He was only forty-two years old. He first played the part of the blatant agitator in M. Sardou's Rabagas-played in London, it will be remembered, by the elder Berton, who died not long afterwards.

MDLLE. PRIOLEAU, a young actress known on

the stage as Mdlle. Juliette, of the Gymnase Theatre, died a few days since, of typhoid fever.

A NEW piece was to be given at the Gymnase on Tuesday; the chief parts being played by Malle. Blanche Pierson and Mdlle. Tallandiera. The author is M. Louis Denayrouze, whose one-act piece at the Français, La Belle Paule, owed everything to the art of Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt.

IN the Temps, Sarcey is reduced to speak of deceased actors and old pieces, about neither of which does he find it easy to be either brilliant or

cost. The boys must be forgiven. The young women appear upon the scene, and there is a brief misunderstanding, caused by the visit of a lady who turns out to be Talbot's aunt. She had come with the best intentions in the world, and when her identity is established, there is nothing more to discuss; for, by this time, the fathers are weary of opposing the marriages they

never exaggerated, never merely farcical: but a new true thing on the stage. The addition to one's list of living people, not lay figures, on the stage, is not indeed of supreme value; but such as it is, we will give it welcome.

FREDERICK WEDMORE.

sympathetic. Grenier's first great part, says M. Sarcey, was in Lambert Thiboust's comedy, L'Homme n'est pas parfait; his best part that of Rabagas, in which the French critic has thus written of him: "Sardou, en le choisissant, avait eu le coup d'œil juste. Le visage et les allures de Grenier convenaient assez au héros que l'auteur s'était proposé de peindre. Il avait le comique