and closing it at his bidding. This was followed by a letter from the rector to the Methodist minister, which contained the following choice specimen of the teachings of this State Church evangelist:

No amount of argument can alter the fact that these burial-grounds which the State, yielding to an agitation of the most wicked and unscrupulous character, has opened to the use of dissenters, are the property of the Church of England. . . . Robbery is robbery, whether perpetrated by a high-handed abuse of power on the part of the State or by the low ruffian who darts out from behind a hedge on the lonely wayfarer. I have no hesitation in saying that all who avail themselves of this unjust and unrighteous act are participators in an utterly indefensible crime, and in the sight of God are guilty of sin.

say

Then this very scrupulous person proceeds, in a postscript, to that "as the ropes and stools, hitherto used for all interments, are the property of the Church," the Methodists must do without them, and bury this dead intruder as best they can. It is perhaps only a straw on the stream, and not a very clean one, but it shows which way one current runs. Similar instances are by no means uncommon, for the State Church has called into existence a class of ecclesiastics who, even in this nineteenth century, act upon the theory that the State Church is the only authentic church appointed by God and established by law. In days gone by, such men were persecutors; now, they are only bigots. Once, they hunted down the living; now, they only spite the dead. But their days are numbered, and their so-called National Church will either be compelled to become true to its name, or will be disestablished and disendowed.

JOHN PAGE HOPPS.

REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

Greek and Gothic. By the Rev. R. St. John Tyrwhitt, Christ Church, Oxford. London: Walter Smith. 1881.

If one would know almost all he needs to know of early Christian art, he may find it in this new book of Mr. Tyrwhitt. Read in connection with his last work on the Art-Teaching of the Primitive Church and with his articles in Smith's new Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, it will furnish all that is needful on this subject.

And what an interesting piece of work this would be to take up! Work? Play, rather, if it be play to have at once wit and imagination and feeling fitly as pleasantly employed. And these thoughtful pages provide other good information and suggestion beside that on matters of art. It has been said of them that they are "Ruskin without nonsense and with sense." The praise this implies is deserved. "Unity" and other clubs, and "classes," among our young people, could hardly hit on any study more en-gaging. The references are plenty, inviting to a generous range of reading. From such research, one comes back with rich "finds" of beauty and of pleasure in it, but also of religious impression. It would be a liberal education in this fascinating subject.

Who that has seen them will forget the examples of early Christian art in the Lateran Museum and Vatican, and in the tombs and catacombs of Rome? Among the "remains" which that city treasures, from Etruscan masonry to the dropping frescos of the Sistine Chapel, I call to mind nothing more fascinating. This much abused word does apply here. Once among them, it is difficult to move off and get away. "Come! Come!" cry the venal cicerone and impatient friends. Yet one will not hear. Thought and imagination and faith and piety are held in their charm, witched with their noble and sacred witchery. Fortunately, Parker's photographs, to which Mr. Tyrwhitt keeps referring, are quite accessible. With these and D'Agincourt, the lack of illustrations to his book will hardly be felt. I have some of them' before me now. They are always a new pleasure. When I am tired of dry-as-dust theology and debate, criticism, exposition, and find the monophysite heresy or Athanasian Orthodoxy just a grain barren of interest, I look over these delightful records of the past. They take me to the early time when the beauty of Christ still

lingered in Christianity, when Christianity still was his, more than of the doctors and ecclesiastics. Then, the beautiful Good Shepherd had not gone away, taking green pastures, still waters, and happy flock with him. The blood-boltered crucifix was not set up yet in place of the "sign of the Son of Man," the transfigured, bejewelled, and illuminated cross. These mosaics, wallpictures, sarcophagi, inscribed tablets and sculptured slabs speak to my eye a precious word of the original gospel of peace and gladness and dear hope, which fell from the lips of Jesus on the Mount and by the lake-side.

Here he is, the winning figure of the Good Shepherd, ever fair and ever young, shapely, and gracious, with an ingenuous, divine smile on his youthful face, set off against his clustering curls and Phrygian cap, tenderly bearing upon his shoulders the sheep which had gone astray. And here is a vine ornament from some tomb, where birds of the air have built their nests, and winged boys pluck the fruit by which the Father is glorified. Here, carved on coffins of the dead, are Christ's deeds of life and light, his acts of mercy and truth, with forerunning types and emblems of him, and gracious scenes from his story. Some of this work, of the fourth century, shows a 'prentice or mere tradesman's hand, which has bungled and left the tool-marks on it. But, by happy chance, in the midst of the rough carving is a lovely finished slab of the Entry into Jerusalem, in which the figure and face of Jesus are as charming as can be ever wished or done, true "lineaments of gospel-books." On another, the magi, in petasus and tunic, are simple and real as Giotto's figures. And here, too, is the famous sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, of the year 359, with its strong, wilful Roman heads, and fine life-look grouping and movement; wall-paintings, too, of A.D. 150, circa,— though badly restored, that is to say ruined, at a later date; and the beautiful mosaic of the vintage, of the early fourth century, from St. Constantia in Rome. When people are at decorating a church, and wish to paint a cross, why do they still put up the endlessly formal and repeated shapes of the bare Latin or trefoiled Gothic? Better paint this one here, from St. Pontianus, which is set with gems and has gold or silver flowers springing half-way up its stem.

These are some of the things, in this very interesting stage of Christian art, which the book introduces us to. Greek and Gothic it calls itself,a taking title, further set forth in the well-chosen ornament of Greek fret and Gothic crest on the covers.

From

a disciple of Mr. Ruskin, like the writer, one might look to have the Greek a little put by, to advance the Gothic. It is not so. Mr. Tyrwhitt is at times quite cross, and too prevailingly sad, it seems to me, about men and things to-day. But it is the Renascence which is at fault, not the Greeks. He is uncompromising in his frank claim for these oldest of old masters. He trusts and honors them, and would have them believed in without "ifs" or "buts." It is refreshing to have the fount and origin of consummate beauty in art traced where it is to be found, and credited where it alone belongs, namely, in the Greek genius. Its standard and canon is found in the works of those who did the sculptures of the Parthenon. Of all misfortunes suffered through destructive time and crimes done by ravage of man, I know none quite so sad as the ruin of these supreme works. To look through the British Museum photographs of the Panathenaic frieze is to have that glorious line of gods and citizens, for its ruin, changed, in the mind, to a melancholy funeral procession of the death and burial of beauty. It might not please Mr. Tyrwhitt to be found in such neo-pagan, humanistic company; but he and Goethe are at one here. Both find our teachers in the fine lore and divine science of art to be the Greeks, and again the Greeks, and still the Greeks.

It is refreshing also to find the mawkish sentimentalism snubbed, which would have Gothic and religious to be tantamount in architecture. "Keble Chapel is excellent; so is the Chapel of Galla Placidia. Just as in Gothic times men lived in Gothic houses, so in classic times they prayed in classically adorned churches. The notion that all Gothic building is Christian, and all Christian building is Gothic, is an error which may yet cause a good deal of prejudice and quarrel." "Excellent" is the word. The Chapel of Galla Placidia excellent? I should say so! I know no carved and crocketted, traceried, groined Gothic chapel of them all which excels it. I recall none that equals it in sober splendor of richest coloring, or in a sort of majestic sweetness of religious impression,- none, unless it be the lower church in Assisi. But that, though it has Giotto's own noble painting on its walls, shows, to my eye and to my mind, nothing so noble and tender and lovely at once as the early mosaic of the Good Shepherd in that dim chapel-tomb in Ravenna.

I am not sure if there be ground for reading: "I perceive that in all things ye are quite religious," instead of "too superstitious,"

there where Paul, on Mars Hill, begins his speech to the men of Athens. Were those speeches in the Acts less Thucydidean, one might swear that were the true reading and Paul's own words, it is so like his own courtesy. It is also like his profound sense, that God had not left himself without witness to those bright people who worshipped him, albeit in ignorance. Certainly, their art was not without its religion; nor, in manifesting forth the beauty which is truth, lacked religious testimony to the truth which is beauty. On p. 78 of this book is a noble passage, but too long to quote, on "the spirit of rejoicing self-sacrifice" in which the Parthenon was built, "the spirit of self-dedication or discipline united with the fullest Greek sense of beauty in its builders." And, of Greek art, it well says that it means to speak of it as the work of human creatures, more like than unlike ourselves,— that is to say, of Theists, to whom the love and fear of an unknown God seemed possible."

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Or of this art which, while one is looking at any of its capital works, like the Theseus or the Hermes, seems to be the only *fine" art in the world, is anything better said than this? — "The great works of the fifth century B.C. are still our models, and the principles and rules of modern schools stand on generalizations from them. Phidias is in the same sense a living authority as Faraday. The Parthenon, as a building in its place and for its original purposes, is the central building of the world. There is no male statue in the world equal to the Theseus and the Ilissus, or the fragmentary Torso; there is no grandeur of female form like Herse or Drosos; no combination of nobility and loveliness like the Venus of Milo." I say it is refreshing to have the absolute and unerring in art thus laid down, against the present habit of sculpture to run in the ways of mere upholstery and mantuamaking, and of art in general to sink below ideal and creative work to mere prettiness and convention; fortunate if it be not to falsehood and baseness.

It is a very quotable book. But no space is left here to quote further from its matterful pages and their good thought concerning art, but concerning history and religion as well, and other related things. By abundant matter and by its high tone, it commends itself easily and well. Concerning art and its influence, it takes the highest tone, sober and pure. It names its subject "Progress and Decay in the three Arts of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting." Its treatment of this is full of good instruction, and its spirit full of right leading and suggestion.

L. G. W.