tributed to his son. A contract of donation was being prepared, when the enquiry above mentioned made known the true state of affairs. Under these circumstances, the Belgian Minister of the Interior begged M. van der Kerkhove to be so kind as to withdraw his gift. The paintings in question are now being exhibited at Ghent, where they create much the same sensation as they did at Antwerp and Brussels. To the French journal L'Art chiefly belongs the merit of having thrown light on this curious mystification. The editor of the Brussels Journal des Beaux Arts still maintains the integrity of the story, and has entered on a long correspondence on the subject.

A NATIONAL exhibition of Fine Arts will be opened at Ferrara in May on the occasion of the fourth centenary of Lodovico Ariosto, which is to be celebrated in that town with great festivities. The Ferrarese Society, Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo, appeals to all the artists of Italy to send contributions. Gold and bronze medals will be awarded at the close of the exhibition.

IN I Raffaello of April 6, the birthday of Raphael, there is an outline drawing of the fresco in the Casa Raffaello at Urbino, supposed to have been executed by Giovanni Santi and to have been intended to represent his wife Magia Ciarla with the infant Raphael in her lap. The head is certainly unlike Santi's usual type of Virgin, and might well have been drawn from nature.

THE Exhibition of Blois will be opened on May 1, a fortnight later that of Montpellier, and Caen at the end of the month. The Dieppe Exhibition will be opened on July 20, and Versailles is preparing for the same date.

THE Musée de Cluny has just received the following specimens, the gift of Mdme. Humbert de Molart:-A large enamel cup on a stem, in grisaille-subject, Lot and his daughters-in the style of Pierre Raymond; an oblong seal of enamelled gold, period of Louis XV., and several fragments of guipures, of which the most remarkable is a complete bodice, entirely in open work.

M. DE JONGE, the new director of the Museum at the Hague, has discovered in the garrets of the Moritzhaus nearly two hundred paintings which have lain rotting for half a century. They are to be placed on the ground-floor of the museum, and will be soon opened to the public, the Dutch minister having obtained a grant of 8,000 florins to defray the expense of arranging them, and of transporting all the Japanese and Chinese curiosities which occupied their place to some other place hired to receive them. Among these paintings so happily brought to light are said to be many of the first order, among which is a Titian of great beauty.

THE first number of an important work on the drawings of the old masters in the principal

galleries of Italy has recently been published by P. Fuiorti, of Florence. The drawings are reproduced by one of the new processes of photolithography, and are most exact copies of the originals. Each number is to cost 1 franc, and will contain four drawings.

THE Italian journals speak very highly of a painting by the Neapolitan artist the Cav. Giuseppe Mancinelli. It represents the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, and is to be placed as an altarpiece in the Cathedral of Altamura.

THE sale of the late M. Galichon's collection of drawings and prints will take place on May 10 and four following days. The catalogue is now out.

THE City Companies, whose survival is mainly due to the national respect for antiquity, show very little veneration for antiquity themselves. The Graphic last week chronicled the dealings of the Fishmongers' and Carpenters' Companies with some noble specimens of Tudor art in Lime Street. The elaborate carvings which adorned the City mansions of the Veres and Nevilles have

been removed and dispersed, and the buildings pulled down to make room for modern warehouses. But the Merchant Taylors' Company, a so-called Conservative corporation, has not been behindhand in the work of destruction. Among the relics of the Carthusian monastery founded by Sir Walter de Manny, which survived until our own time, was the cloister surrounded by a terrace walk-a feature of considerable size and almost unique in character. In adapting the premises to the uses of the new Merchant Taylors' school, the company's architect has destroyed onehalf of this interesting fragment, leaving the other half a truncated corpus sine nomine a passage leading to nothing, blocked across its length by the new erection, like a railway with the débris of a collapsed train.

THE Allgemeine Zeitung states that much surprise has been excited in artistic circles to find that the design for the curtain of the new Court Theatre at Dresden, bearing the motto Providentiae Memor, is not, as was universally believed, the work of Makart, of Vienna, but has been sent in by Professor Ferdinand Keller, of Karlsruhe, who has received the appointed prize of 5,000 marks, and is now preparing to carry into execution his successful plan.

THE art collection belonging to the late M. Fortuny will be sent to Paris for sale at the end of this month. In addition to the large and interesting series of pictures painted by Fortuny himself of views at Portici, Rome, Madrid, Seville, Granada, and Tangiers, the collection will include many valuable specimens of Spanish and Moorish ceramic ware belonging to the fifteenth century, and textile fabrics, illustrating industrial art as far back as the eleventh century.

AN important collection of drawings by the well-known German artist Alfred Rethel is to be seen at the permanent exhibition at Düsseldorf. Among them are two large cartoons representing Charlemagne at the Council of Frankfort, and the Embassy of the Caliph Haroun al Raschid to Charlemagne.

DR. WAAGEN, in his notice of Rembrandt (Handbook of Painting, 1860, p. 340) writes: "In the absence of pictures by his masters, Van Swanenburg and Pinas, it is difficult to ascertain what he learnt from them." Students of Rembrandt's works will probably be interested to know that a

fine work of Pynas's (canvas about 3 ft. 6 in. by 2 ft. 6 in.) may be seen at Aachen in the possession of Mr. Wings. The subject represented is the Dismissal of Agar by Abraham. On the right the patriarch, clothed in red with white turban, his right hand resting on the head of Ishmael kneeling before him on one knee, with his hands placed one in the other. Abraham has his left hand raised in the act of dismissing Agar, who stands before him, barefooted, in red skirt and yellow dress, with a scarf round her waist.

On the left a farm, with steps leading up to the house door; a man feeding a horse, a woman, two goats, and a cow; a stream with bridge; hilly background, with ruins. The colouring, warm and true to nature, bears considerable analogy to the earlier works of Rembrandt. Signed, J. Pywriter saw the picture, was not sufficiently strong nas, fecit 1613 or 1603—the light, when the for him to decide with certainty which.

THE Society for the History of French Art has just decided on publishing a quarterly journal. This Society has already, as we learn from Polybiblion, published Nouvelles Archives de l'Art Français, 1872 and 1873 (1874 in the press); and a Mémoire pour servir à l'histoire des maisons royales et bastimens de France, par André Félibien. It has now in the press Les Procès-verbaux de l'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture de 1648 à 1792, which will give the official and detailed history of French artists during the period named, and will be completed in four or five

annual volumes.

THE

[APRIL 24, 1875.

THE STAGE.

66 MERCHANT OF VENICE WALES'S.

AT THE PRINCE OF

THE popular success of the revivals of legitimate

drama at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, in so far as it is occasioned by peculiar attention to scenery and stage management, is one that it is dangerous to repeat very often. It is the kind of success of which no one theatrical director can retain the monopoly. It is very worthy, in its way, for it is not obtained by any display of mere barbarian splendour, nor merely of petty accuracies with which human interest has nothing to do. It is got by a display of genuine taste and judgment, but is none the less perilous for that. For though the taste of Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft does appear to be quite exceptionally good, it is not nowadays an exclusive possession. The managers who have not got it themselves may some day think it worth while to buy it of the artists and decorators, and then there will be half a dozen theatres each with the spécialité of the Prince of Wales's. And when that day comes, some one will find out that the art of acting is a spécialité too; and rather a desirable one. And then we shall see repeated or striven for, right and left, the success, not of the School for Scandal-a success of Chippendale and delft and marqueterie-but of Sweethearts: success of delicate art and human interest.

At the Prince of Wales's, all that good taste and care could do to make the Venice of the Middle Ages live before us, has been done, and new stage business" has been pressed into the service to add to the illusion. Fragments of the Ducal Palace seem built up solidly; the sunburnt Venetians loll lazily under the arches; a traveller arrives on the Place, beggars accost him and are rewarded, and straightway make the sign to others to enjoy a like largesse; there is the fruitstall and the water-melons; there is the curious unfamiliar mingling of narrow footway and narrow canal in the city view, and you look across from the Piazzetta to San Giorgio and the little barracks. Never before was the outward life of Venice made so real to you on the stage. But the acting is not, on the whole, on a par with the stage management, and Mr. Gordon's scenery will have the largest share in the general success.

And yet, not quite the largest, for there is one character-of all but one the most importantacted with a most admirable art: an excellence

delightfully sustained from end to end. It is really not too much to say of Miss Ellen Terry's Portia that it is an entirely complete and satisfactory thing. It shows a quite remarkable advance upon every performance of Miss Terry's earlier youth; adding to the old high spirit-dashed not a jot-a new thoughtfulness and discretion, never lacking to this performance from the first line to

the last.

"Genius" is a word that has been used rightly, for the character of Portia, pleasant as it of this performance, and used, perhaps not quite must be to play, affords, one imagines, little room for genius-this "unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractised," can neither exhibit any rare subtlety nor yield to over-mastering impulse. But what Miss Terry shows here-and she shows all that phrase and turn of the dialogue is enriched and the part gives her the means of showing-is an excellent spirit, guided by excellent art. Each illustrated by a new gesture, or an altered tone. The light talk with Nerissa, the girlish fun when the Prince of Morocco and the Prince of Arragon are in the act of choosing wrongly-fun hidden by a good heart, and by prudence too, which fears the consequence premature disclosure-the abandonment to delight when Bassanio has chosen wisely: these main things are well done, but others, less noticeable, are as well done, and conceived sometimes with more originality. When Lorenzo is uttering to Portia the praises of Antonio, whose mishap she is minded to relieve, Miss Terry says well, "I never did repent of doing good," and follows

of

SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1875. No. 156, New Series.

THE EDITOR cannot undertake to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected manuscript.

It is particularly requested that all business letters regarding the supply of the paper, &c., may be addressed to the PUBLISHER, and not to the EDITOR.

LITERATURE.

SIR HOPE GRANT ON THE CHINA WAR.

Incidents in the China War of 1860, compiled from the Journals of General Sir Hope Grant. By Captain H. Knollys, R.A. (London: Blackwood & Sons, 1875.) THE many readers of Sir Hope Grant's Incidents in the Sepoy War will be ready to receive with cordial welcome the little volume now presented to the public on his Chinese campaign, and will be prepared for its general characteristics. There is the same simplicity and straightforwardness of narrative, characteristic of the lamented General's frank and manly personal attributes; the same frequent ignoring of self (so remarkable in an autobiographer), and slight treatment of the share borne by the narrator in very great events; the same careful editing on the part of Captain Knollys, who has accomplished his share of the task in a manner that deserves high praise. It gives an additional touch of interest to this volume, albeit one of a melancholy kind, that the printed sheets for it were laid before the writer after he had been seized with the mortal malady that deprived the country of his services; so that it may be said to appear as a sort of bequest, recording the highest one that he ever accomplished of the many varied duties entrusted to him. In other respects it can hardly reach the same historic value as his former work. There is a never-dying interest attached to the great tragedy enacted in the varied scenes round Delhi, Cawnpore, and Lucknow, and to the events which for the hour shook the whole fabric of greatness England has built up in the East; which cannot be found in the records of a campaign conducted with steady straightforward success against an empire which proved unable even to make a moderately good defence of its own heart against the attacks that its councillors up to the last treated so lightly as those of the Emperor of China plainly did the advance of the allied Powers on Pekin, even after the fall of the Taku forts and of Tientsin left the road open to the capital.

There is a plain military moral of much importance that lies almost on the surface of this narrative. It may be necessary for general policy's sake that two great Powers should combine their forces to punish a common enemy, whose barbarous or semicivilised strength would be unable to cope with either of them singly: but for any less reason than an important state necessity, such a combination is to be absolutely con

demned. What was the consequence in this particular case? So badly were matters managed between the allies, that the jealous arrangement which was to limit their contingents to precisely equal strengths of 10,000 men each, was tacitly dropped almost from the first. The British force far exceeded this estimate. The French, with no great base like India to draw from, came far behind it. The net result was that the latter furnished a bare third of the nominal strength, and a much less proportion (as Captain Knollys well shows) of the fighting power that did the chief part of the actual work, that at the Taku forts. And yet throughout the operations, from first to last, we were compelled to keep up the official fiction that the French were there in equal strength to ourselves; to give them the place of honour at the most critical moments, a condition which allowed that stolen march of theirs on and plunder of the Summer Palace, which Captain Knollys has done rightly to expose with thoroughness in his précis of the evidence; and to consult at every turn of the operations their staff as well as our own, thus leaving room for that division of counsels which is almost as certain to follow, under such cononditions, as night to succeed day. When to the difficulties thus created for Sir Hope Grant in the first terms of the problem put into his hands to solve; it is added that the officer associated with him in rank and power by the French was the very Count Palikao who, when clothed with brief authority in his tenure of the Paris War Office in the fatal August of 1870, made himself memorable for ever as the most blundering mismanager who ever attempted to dictate strategy to distant generals from a minister's closet: we become sensible that the British general must have had within him far higher qualities than those ever gave him credit for who had noted him merely as the methodical hardriding colonel of a crack cavalry regiment, whose puritanism never interfered with the smart action of his squadrons, or even as the fire-eating brigadier of horse in the Delhi campaign. To have carried on without a check from first to last the operations that led to the fall of Pekin, would have been no slight task had he been unfettered. To have accomplished this when burdened by the presence of Palikao as coadjutor; his opening delays, impracticable proposals for separate operations, and faltering or mistaken counsels at the crisis of the campaign: this, indeed, was no ordinary achievement. Not that we are at all disposed to admit with Captain Knollys that the Chinese expedition is to be held as pre-eminent above other very similar ones in our modern history. Indeed, the chief exception we should make to his reflections on it is to the statement that "it is scarcely too much to say that the Chinese war of 1860 may be considered the most successful and the best carried out of England's 'little wars."" To critics less interested, the prompt and thorough punishment of the drunken tyrant King Theodore, and the humiliation of the bloody despot of Coomassie, will seem every whit as good proofs of British forethought in design, and endurance in execution. Where three suc

cesses of the same character were so com

plete, it is a mistake to exalt one too loudly above the others. For lauded thus as excelling all other like adventurous campaigns, the advance of 10,000 picked British troops on the Chinese capital inevitably attracts comparison with the overthrow of the other and, for the time, more formidable barbarian power of China, flushed with the prestige of repeated victory and the fanaticism of a new creed, by the unaided genius of a single British leader. As a military achievement, Gordon's campaign against the Taepings as much transcends any of the wars we have spoken of as the discipline and dash of Probyn's Regiment of Horse that covered the advance of Sir Hope's columns, outdid those of the handful of coolies, officered by runaway adventurers, with which Gordon undertook the extirpation of a false faith and the restoration of a shattered empire. Nor should it be forgotten, when the Pekin expedition is compared with those that have followed it, that Sir Hope had for one of his divisional generals the most brilliant officer the Indian Mutiny had raised to distinction-the future conqueror of Abyssinia. He himself is very careful to do justice to the assistance he received in the chief action at the Taku forts from Napier's abilities as an engineer. But other eye-witnesses of the Chinese campaign have said that the innate gift for tactics which had already shown itself in India from the time that that engineer first appeared at Lord Gough's side in the desperate struggle with the Seikhs in 1848, was as conspicuous in the Pekin expedition as his more technical mastery of the details of his particular branch of the service. It is too early, however, for controversy on such matters. Enough to say that Captain Knollys is right to praise in the highest terms the performance of the great task entrusted to Sir Hope; nor is it necessary to this end to compare it with those other "little wars of the results of which Englishmen have a right to feel proud, not merely for their own sakes, but because they have taught Europe that the old spirit of enterprise, energy, and courage has not wholly left these islands of

ours.

Another great military lesson was to he gathered from this campaign which applied exclusively to ourselves, and happily it has not been lost on our government. This was the necessity of recognising the simplefact that India is no longer a colony to bedefended from this country; but rather a separate empire under the same supreme head, which should not only provide for its own security, with the help, of course, of British counsels and British leaders, but form the base for all our foreign policy in the East. The Chinese war of 1860 should have been directed, all future wars in the Indian Ocean should be directed, not from London, but Calcutta; not by a Secretary of State at the other side of the world, but by the Viceroy of our Eastern empire. All sound military principle points to this. Nor less do the facts recorded in the work before us, where we find the Secretary for War-happily in this case the ablest Great Britain has had within the present generation-after a com mander of the expedition had been ap

66

pointed from the Indian staff, and troops to form it selected from the Indian army, suddenly intervening to assume the management by letters from Pall Mall, and only escaping the usual evils of such indirect and distant administration by the large discretion he had the good sense to leave to the general in command. Such confidential letters of Sydney Herbert's as are here published cannot fail to be interesting. To an observant mind no part of them is more so than the passages in which that lamented statesman deplores the cross purposes necessarily entailed by the system then in vogue of carrying on war with Indian means, and making believe that they were not Indian at all. "I regret very much," we find him, for instance, writing, "the loss of the Indian Commissariat. I fear that Our people will make blunders as to native caste prejudices, and so on, which would be serious. It is another instance of the great inconvenience of having two separate civil jealous services in lieu of one with a common interest and object." Lord Herbert (the War Minister was then a peer) would have been more correct had he said that it was another instance of the absurdity of sending a large force from India without its own Indian departments to make it complete. To keep up the fiction that it came not from India but Great Britain, a raw commissariat was sent out to manage for troops whose habits they knew nothing of, and the success of the whole campaign jeopardised. This unreal and effete view of our military position in the East seems to have been abandoned thereafter; and when a like work had to be accomplished in Abyssinia, the wisdom of Downing Street made no greater blunder than the committing the care of the preparations to one of the subordinate administrations of India instead of its Supreme Government; being apparently under the delusion that the Governor of Bombay is in the semi-independent position which his predecessors occupied in the days of Clive. Such a political survival shows how forms of authority liye on after the substance has long passed away.

It is not our purpose to follow with Captain Knollys the course of the Chinese campaign. To those who know the history even slightly, a reviewer's summary would be of little value; and even those who know it well may profitably study the course of the whole affair as traced in Sir Hope Grant's own clear unpretending notes, which his editor has brought into completeness and connected form with a care that has increased their value. Not the least interesting part of this interesting volume are the glimpses into Chinese imperial life afforded by the careful selection given of the State papers captured in the Summer Palace. For the edification of those who imagine that all addresses to the Emperor-who certainly in the national theory is generally, as Captain Knollys observes, "treated as a kind of divinity"—are necessarily couched in abject and flattering words, we conclude our notice of this pleasant little volume by transcribing some part of a curious letter of remonstrance to the monarch on the rumour first spreading that he was about to flee from his capital, before the barbarian enemy,

to his hunting seat at Gehol, in the interior. This document is couched in the form of a "Memorial by Tsae-tang-Yung, Censor (or chief finance officer) of the Hoo-kwang provinces," who writes:

"The confusion and alarm are indescribable. But there has been nothing so strange as the report now heard, that your Majesty intended This has caused the making a tour to Gehol. utmost consternation, but your Minister does not believe in it. If, indeed, the report is true, the effect produced will be like a convulsion of nature, and the mischief must be irreparable. In what light does your Majesty regard your people? In what light the shrines of your ancestors, or the altars of the tutelary gods? Will you cast away the inheritance of your ancestors like a damaged shoe? What would history say of your Majesty for a thousand generations henceforward? It has never been known that a sove

reign should choose a time of danger and distress to make a hunting tour, supposing that thereby he would prevent trouble. If the capital should be disturbed, what would there be to save Gehol alone from being disturbed? Your Majesty is besought to return without delay to your palace, in order that the people's minds may be reassured against the enemy."

CHA. C. CHESNEY.

The Works of George Chapman. With an Introduction by Algernon Charles Swinburne. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.)

George Chapman: a Critical Essay. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.) CHAPMAN's translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Batrachomyomachia, and the Hymns of Homer were republished by Mr. J. R. Smith in 1857. His Tragedies, Comedies, and Masques were collected and reprinted by Mr. John Pearson in 1873. The present edition by Messrs. Chatto and Windus combines the Dramatic Works and the translations, with the addition of a great many minor poems, republished now for the first time. The amount of attention which Chapman has thus received within a period of seventeen years will, to the most enthusiastic admirers of Elizabethan literature, appear a just but tardy recognition of his merits, while those who share Byron's opinion about the dramatists may be inclined to think that one republication of his works by a competent scholar would have sufficed for his fame. Chapman's Plays have been so recently made the subject of criticism in the ACADEMY (see September 1, 1873), that it will be enough to state regarding this new issue, that it is as full as that of Mr. Pearson. The present editor, Mr. R. H. Shepherd, has, however, followed a method more agreeable to the ordinary reader and really more satisfactory to the student, by modernising the orthography and not adhering to the misprints of the first editions. Thus Chapman's plays may now be read with tolerable ease; Mr. Pearson's reprint, meanwhile, retaining the attractions which old-fashioned type, quaint spelling, and chosen paper have for some tastes.

The chief feature of Messrs. Chatto and Windus' publication is the introductory Essay on George Chapman by Mr. Swinburne, a critical dissertation of such importance as to call for separate attention.

Nowhere perhaps has Mr. Swinburne com. posed a passage of more eloquent prose than that in praise of Marlowe which concludes the treatise. For the first time the whole truth has here been said about Marlowe, without hesitation and without stint, by one whose double gift of poetry and scholarship gives him the right to adjudicate the laurel ex cathedra. Nor is this noble panegyric of a singer whom many men of worth have praised, but whom none has hitherto commended duly, a mere piece of splendid rhetoric. Compared with Mr. Swinburne's prose in other portions even of this essay, the peroration is tempe rate in style, weighty with well-considered thought, and pregnant with such high philosophy of art as only a true poet can enunciate. This coronation of Marlowe at the hands of a brother bard has long been waited for. It is as though, reversing Shelley's line on Keats, the lyrist of our day should say to the great founder of the English stage :

"Assume thy winged throne thou Phosphor of our throng."

Mr. Swinburne's panegyric of Marlowe grows out of his analysis of the peculiar quality of Chapman's genius. Chapman, like Jonson, was, he argues, a man who might have won distinction by his talents in many paths of life, a poet by choice of work, not by necessity of vocation. Heavi ness of handling, the lack of true passion, labour substituted for immediate inspiration, analysis accepted in the stead of intuition, spoiled the best work of both :

:

"The most ambitious and the most laborious poets of their day, conscious of high aims and large capacities, they would be content with no crown that might be shared by others; they had each his own severe and haughty scheme of study lay beyond or outside it; that any could lie above, and invention, and sought for no excellence which past the reach of their strong arms and skilful hands, past the scope of their keen and studious eyes, they would probably have been unable to believe or to conceive. And yet there were whole regions of high poetic air, whole worlds of human passion and divine imagination, which might be seen by humbler eyes than theirs, and trodden by feebler breathe, and their strenuous song fell silent. Not feet, where their robust lungs were powerless to greater spirits alone, such as Marlowe's and Shakespeare's, but such lesser spirits as Decker's had the secret of ways unknown to them in the world of poetry, the key of chambers from which they were shut out."

That is delicately spoken as well as deeply thought. Here, again, are sentences which form the basis of a true critique of Chapman's merits as a translator:-"For all his labours in the field of Greek translation no poet was ever less of a Greek in style or spirit. He enters the serene temples, and handles the holy vessels of Hellenic art with the stride and the grasp of a high-handed and high-minded barbarian."

In another place Mr. Swinburne remarks: "The temperament of Chapman had more in it of an Icelandic than a Hellenic poet's; and had Homer been no more than the mightiest of skalds, or the Iliad than the greatest of sagas, Chapman would have been fitter to play the part of their herald or interpreter."

In addition to the limitations of his genius which Chapman shared with Jonson, and to this Hyperborean barbarism of temperament,