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of faith might be out of place in "Macbeth," or Cordelia," or "Lear; " but we should have expected them in Richard II. and his queen, in Desdemona, and still more in Hamlet, who had been a student at Wittenberg. Yet Hamlet, who had pondered more than most men on the great questions of life and the destiny of man, when unexpectedly overtaken by death, has nothing more to say than those ominous words, "The rest is silence!" Even the vindication of God's order and judgment, of which he is made the instru

ment, leaves him as darkling as it finds him. Must we then think that the godly spirit and faith of Luther had departed? that Protestantism had failed as well as Romanism? or that Shakspeare, in thus ignoring the great central truth, like Bacon, was, like Bacon, unconsciously exhibiting the Calvinistic tendency, the downward and disorganizing progress of his age, by substituting man for God as the great centre of this universe, as the sole and engrossing subject of human interest?

M. MICHEL CHEVALIER, who has few equals as an authority on all French financial questions, has submitted to his countrymen in the columns of the Débats what he considers to be a precise statement of the annual amount that must be provided for payment of interest on the national debt, when all the expenditure attributable to the late war has been taken into account. The conclusion at which he arrives is startling enough. The France of the future—that is, France after 1874 -will have to provide by annual taxation for the payment of interest on debt a milliard of francs, or forty millions sterling. This is an enormous sum, and largely beyond what those who have hitherto published calculations on behalf of the Government have suggested as probable or possible. But M. Chevalier, under the veil of a polite suggestion that the Government published its calculations before some of the items of expenditure were known, tells his official friends that they have, consciously or unconsciously, hoodwinked the credulous French public. He himself thinks it desirable before all things that France should know the worst. He thinks that the knowledge of what she has got to bear, far from dispiriting her, will only excite her energies and develop her force. Whether, if M. Chevalier were now in office, he would take such a sanguine view of his countrymen, and would hold that the best thing for them is to tell them everything, must remain doubtful, as no one can say how far M. Chevalier, if he were an official, would be totally unlike every other French official known to Frenchmen. At any rate

he has published his calculations, and his countrymen have now a full opportunity of realizing what, if he is right, lies before them. At present, however, it is not probable that they will be either encouraged or discouraged by learning that in three years the annual interest on their debt will reach a milliard. The great bulk of Frenchmen know nothing and care nothing just now about their future financial prospects. They have not as yet felt the pressure of new taxation. They think that the success of their new loan shows that they have surprising and inexhaustible resources; and they are largely animated by a secret persuasion that, by some sudden and unaccountable stroke of fortune, things in the next year or so will turn against the Prussians, and that France will escape paying the last three milliards of the indemnity. But the few reflecting Frenchmen who, like M. Chevalier, have no belief in sudden turns of fortune coming to the aid of vanquished nations, and who are capable of looking forward, naturally regard the question of finance as above all other questions important to their country. If it is true that France will have to pay several millions more annually than was thought probable to meet the interest of the debt, this means that new taxes to the amount of so many millions must be devised, voted, and endured. This is where the shoe pinches. The financial difficulty is a political one, or at least after a certain stage will almost necessarily become one. The primary question is not whether France could bear the burden of forty millions sterling interest on the public

debt. There is very little doubt that she could bear it, not indeed without great inconvenience and suffering, but still she could bear it. The question is whether any Government that is likely to exist in the next few years can invent taxes to the requisite amount that the nation will patiently endure. It does not follow that, even if the burden of new taxation provoked dissatisfaction or revolution, France would repudiate or become bankrupt. The natural wish to keep faith with the public creditor may be so strong as to arm some Government with power sufficient to get in the necessary money. But Frenchmen who attempt to judge what is the probable future lying before them and their children see that in the possibility of burdensome taxation leading to revolution there is a new source of danger opened before their unhappy and distracted country, and therefore it is of the utmost importance to them to examine what the total cost of their ruinous war has really been.

Before the war the interest of the public debt reached the annual figure of fourteen millions sterling and a-half. Since the war broke out there have been three new loans that made in the last days of the Empire, the Gambetta loan, and the recent loan for the payment of the first portion of the German indemnity. M. Chevalier puts the interest on these loans at a little short of eight millions sterling. The remainder of the indemnity, if borrowed on the same terms as the last loan, will involve a further annual charge of a little over eight millions. So that sixteen millions are to be added to the fourteen and a-half of the previous debt. M. Chevalier also, for some reason which he does not explain, estimates that nearly three-quarters of a million will be needed as the interest on the sum due to the Eastern Railway Company. The value of the lines taken over by the Germans is to be deducted from the indemnity, and M. Chevalier has already reckoned the interest on the full amount of the indemnity. Probably, however, a sum equal to that which the French Government subtracts from the payment of the indemnity on account of the railways has been consumed by it for its temporary needs. Then twenty millions sterling are to be expended in aiding the sufferers by the war in the provinces; and twenty

millions at least more will be needed to repair the damage done to roads and canals, to buy new stores for the army, and to make good the deficiencies in the budgets of the present year and of the next two or three years. The interest on these forty millions is put down by M. Chevalier at very nearly two millions and three-quarters. This, with the interest on the sum due to the Eastern Railway Company, makes three millions and a-half to be added to the thirty and a-half at which he had previously arrived —that is, thirty-four millions in all. But then there is to be added a sum of two millions which represents pensions and annuities granted by the State, and sums due as guarantees to Railway Companies. This is nothing new; and if it is now reckoned as part of the sum to be met yearly on account of the public debt, it ought also to have been reckoned as part of that which had to be found annually before the war; so that if France will hereafter have to meet, as M. Chevalier calculates, an annual charge of forty millions sterling, the increase due to the war must be reckoned at the difference between sixteen millions and a-half sterling and forty millions sterling. This is twentythree millions and a-half sterling, and this will be the permanent burden inflicted on France for the future, on account of a war which lasted nearly as possible six months. Assuming that the sum due to the Eastern Railway Company may be properly taken twice over on account of the present pressing needs of the French Government obliging it to spend a sum equal to that due to the Railway Company, then M. Chevalier's figures seem to be right,

unless future loans can be made on better terms than the last loan. He discusses the question whether more favorable terms are to be expected, and he urges that while there are some reasons why the terms of future loans may be expected to be more favorable, there are others why they may be expected to be less favorable, and that therefore it is safer to take the standard of the last loan than to speculate on unknown contingencies. It may be observed that M. Chevalier says plainly that his chief reason for feeling uncertain as to what will be the terms on which the State can borrow hereafter is that he does not feel sure that the borrowing Government will be a Govern

ment that can show itself capable of holding down the revolutionary party. So many persons, however, think favorably of French finance that they will be inclined to impugn the calculations of M. Chevalier on the head of the terms of future loans. If it is to be supposed that the French Government could get out a loan twice and a half the size of the recent loan at the price at which that loan stands now, which surely is a very favorable supposition for France, the ultimate burden would be about a million sterling less. So far, therefore, as M. Chevalier has hitherto carried us, the public burden may be reckoned at thirty-six millions of annual payment if he is right as to the terms on which future loans can be issued, or at thirty-five millions if a much more favorable estimate on this head is adopted. But then this is not all. The Government of France has incurred another debt in consequence of the war besides those represented in these thirty-six or thirtyfive millions. It has borrowed, and still continues to borrow, enormous sums from the Bank of France. "The dictatorial Government of Tours and Bordeaux, if it can be called a Government," M. Chevalier says, "forced the Bank to make very large advances, in spite of the principles adopted by the Bank and the laws ruling it." The result is that the Bank, the whole capital of which is a little over seven millions sterling, is owed by the State upwards of fifty-three millions sterling, and is going to advance it eight millions more. M. Thiers, it will be remembered, proposed to pay off this sum by annual instalments spread through a series of years, which would have rendered necessary during that time additional taxation to the amount of eight millions sterling a year. M. Chevalier does not even notice this proposal. He takes for granted that, if the State wants to pay off its debt to the Bank, its only way of doing so will be to borrow the money; and he calcu

lates that the interest of the money so borrowed would reach four millions sterling, thus bringing up his thirty-six millions to forty. We much wish that M. Chevalier had discussed more fully the position of the State and of the Bank with reference to this loan. M. Thiers stated that for the greater part of the sixty odd millions due to the Bank the State would henceforth be paying interest at only one per cent. ; and even if he was wrong in thinking that France would find the money to pay off the loan in eight years, it seems as if some better management must be possible for the country than to borrow at over six per cent. to redeem a debt that only bears interest at one per cent. The larger part of the advances made by the Bank were made in the shape of a greatly increased issue of notes which were declared inconvertible into gold. But this enormous addition to the paper currency of France has been made without depreciating the value of the notes in gold. This would seem to show that there is room in France for a much larger paper currency than existed previously to the

war.

If this be so, it will probably not be found necessary to withdraw all the notes issued since the war in order to return to a metallic currency. So far as the authorized issue of the Bank can be permanently enlarged with safety, it will be unnecessary to borrow gold to retire the notes issued to the Government in the advances made by the Bank. A considerable sum must undoubtedly be paid in gold to the Bank, or its position would be compromised, and it would no longer have the resources it requires to facilitate the trade of the country. But until M. Chevalier has furnished further explanations, it certainly appears as if he had committed an error in supposing that the only thing the State has to do is to borrow over sixty millions at about six per cent. in order to place itself right with the Bank.

IT is impossible for a sojourner in Venice to have spent hours in front of those colossal canvases of Tintoretto hours which have gradually brought him into something like personal acquaintance

with that wonderful man-without longing for some details of the sort of life passed by him in that small, but not inelegant dwelling, which may still be discovered by the curious in a distant and out-of-the

way quarter of the strangely beautiful sea

city.

But little can be found to gratify this desire. But some fragments may be gathered by a careful searcher for them. And as this gathering has never yet been done, as far as the present writer is aware, and no English inquirer is likely to have the time and means needed for doing it for himself, it may perhaps be not unacceptable, that it should be done for him here.

The house in which the painter passed the latter years of his life, and in which he died, has been described, and its whereabouts indicated. The contract of purchase, bearing date the 8th of June, 1574, --executed by Pietro Episcopi, his father-in-law, on his behalf-is still extant. There is also extant a return made by him of his property for the purpose of taxation, in which the rent of the house is stated at twenty ducats a month, subject to deduction on account of a mortgage to the amount of five hundred ducats, bearing interest at six per cent., due to the person from whom the property was bought. The above estimate of the value of the house at twenty ducats a month is a startling one. The ducat was about equal to ten shillings, and it is generally held that the nominal value of money at the beginning of the sixteenth century must be multiplied at least by ten, in order to find its worth in the nominal value of our own day. And thus calculating it, we should have the rent of Tintoretto's small house stated at £1,200 a year in our present money-which is of course utterly out of the question. It is true that the return states the rent at twenty ducats, without any such word as "monthly" or "annually." And if, as to our notions would seem a matter of course, the annual value were intended, the rent of the house would have been equivalent to £100 of our money, which is quite as much as one would have supposed. But there is this difficulty. How could a mortgage, the annual interest of which was thirty ducats, be secured on a property the annual rent of which was twenty ducats? And that in a country where mortgages are never permitted to approach so nearly to the limit of the value of the property mortgaged as they often do with us. It is clear that this could not be. In my difficulty on the subject I carried the passage of

the return to my friend Signor Velludo, the able and always obliging librarian of St. Mark's library. And he at once declared that the twenty ducats named in the return must be understood to be the monthly value, and that such a manner of speaking was quite in accordance with Venetian habitudes. Still it is totally impossible to suppose that the small house in question in a distant quarter of Venice was worth the equivalent of £1,200 a year! And we can only come to the conclusion, either that the return was a fictitious one, or that whatever may have been the case in other communities where money was scarcer, the rule of multiplying nominal amounts of the sixteenth century by ten, in order to find the equivalent value in the money of our own day, must be wholly fallacious as regards the wealthy commercial city of Venice. Nevertheless the former explanation seems to be the more probable one. And other facts relative to the methods in use at that period for rating property for the purpose of taxation seem to show that such is likely to have been the case. I believe upon the whole that the value of the house stated at twenty ducats was meant to be the yearly value; but that that sum was very far below the real value, probably to the extent of being only a third part of it. And it is to be observed that this undervaluation could not have been at all events altogether fraudulent, inasmuch as the return contains on the face of it the statement, that a mortgage of which the annual interest was thirty ducats was secured on the property. We must conclude, therefore, that it was systematical and recognized that the return for rating was in all cases very much below the real value.

Tintoretto returns himself as the possessor also of a small farm situated in the immediate neighborhood of Mestre, of which the produce (payable from the farmer to the landlord) was seventeen quarters of wheat and fourteen tuns of wine, and as honoraries due from the farmer according to custom, one goose, fifty eggs, two pairs of hens, two pairs of chickens, and one ham. On this farm there was also a mortgage of four hundred ducats at six per cent.

Tintoretto left his property to his wife for her life, and then to his children gen. erally, with, as it should seem, certain powers of appointment by the widow.

The painter had two sons, Domenico and Marco, and five daughters, Marietta, two named Ottavia, Perinna, and Laura. Domenico, well known as a more than respectable artist, who worked with and assisted his father in several of his later works, especially in the great "Paradiso," in the Sala del Maggiore Consiglio, eventually became the owner and occupier of the house in Venice. Marco seems to have been a ne'er-do-weel. And his mother exercised in respect to him the right of "conditioning"-as the phrase in her will has it-his share of his father's property. He is left in fact in a sort of tutelage to the discretion of his brother Domenico. Nothing further is heard of him. Marietta, whom we shall have occasion to return to again, died before her father, in 1590, at the age of thirty. She was married to one Mario Augusta, a jeweller (reckoned in those days as much entitled to rank as an artist as a painter), but she does not seem to have left any offspring. Perinna and one of the Ottavias became nuns in the convent of St. Ann, in Venice. They are by the widow's will recommended to the care of their brother Domenico. These two poor women piously worked in silk embroidery a copy of their father's great picture of the Crucifixion, at St. Rocco, for an altar-covering for the chapel of their convent. And there remained a constant tradition among the sisterhood that one of them became blind (as may well be believed) from laboring in that truly tremendous task. Zabeo saw this embroidery in 1813. Of Laura nothing is known save that she survived-but probably not for many years-her father and her mother.

The other Ottavia was married to a German painter of the name of Casser; and she became ultimately the possessor of the family property. Domenico had intended to bequeath the house in which his father had lived and labored, together with the large, and at that day important, collection of casts from the antique and from the works of Michael Angelo, as an academy for the painters of Venice. But he was led to change his mind; and by will, dated 20th of October, 1630, left the entire property to his sister Ottavia, the wife of Sebastian Casser. Domenico died in 1637. Ottavia outlived all her brothers and sisters, and by a will, dated 8th October, 1645, bequeathed everything to her

It

husband. And by their lineal descendants the house was possessed and inhabited up to the year 1835, and a year or two longer. In that year it was occupied by two brothers, Angelo and Andrea Casser. But very shortly afterwards it passed to persons of another name and family. would seem, however, either that Sebastian Casser, the German painter, had relatives of the same name settled in Venice in the fifteenth century, or that there are still many descendants of Tintoretto living. For Casser is at the present day by no means an uncommon name in Venice.

The long room at the top of the house, which tradition declares to have been the studio of the painter, is still pointed out, though the great changes which the interior of the house has evidently undergone render one rather sceptical as to any very accurate certainty on this subject. We hear much from the contemporaries of the great painter, or more immediately from those who came after them in the succeeding generation, of the solitariness of Tintoretto's habits in his studio, of the jealousy with which he excluded visitors, and of the secrecy he maintained with respect to the processes used by him. All this was entirely in accordance with the common notions and practices of that day, not only as regarded the art of painting, but as regarded every other art and even handicraft. It was an age when artisans and artists had to discover processes and methods for themselves; and when they had succeeded in doing so, it is intelligible that they should have been anxious to reap the whole advantage of their discoveries. And of course the next thing that occurred in natural sequence was, that an immense amount of humbug mixed itself up with the matter. Tintoretto did employ novel processes-unfor-. tunately, as has been explained in a former article and they were processes (adopted with a view to increased speed in execution) which he may well have been unwilling that others should spy the secret of. It were to be wished much that the secret had remained one, and had died with him! We should not then have been vexed by all the black canvases of the school of the tenebrosi! The genius, the creative imagination, the power that did die with him, no spying into the secrets of his workshop could have made the spyers any the better for.