others, fled to Ægina, and took refuge in the temple of Ajax. "No place was sacred;" they were torn away from the horns of the altar, dragged before Antipater, and put to death. A more illustrious prey awaited the hunters in the temple of Poseidon at Calauria. The circumstances of his death are variously recounted; but it is most probable that poison rescued the most illustrious of Athenian statesmen from the dishonours inflicted on his companions :

"The conquerors could but make a fire of him:
Demosthenes only overcame himself,

And no man else had honour by his death."

We now close Mr. Grote's volumes; with some regret that he does not prosecute his narrative to the extinction of the Achæan League. But he has, perhaps, judged wisely, both for the interest of his work and for the completeness of its form, in thus dropping the curtain with the last grand crisis of the drama. With Alexander a new cycle of events begins; with Demosthenes the old order closes. The nation is yet to be born which shall again exhibit to the world such a consummation and such a renascence as were accorded to the race of Hellas.

ART. III.-PICTURES AND PICTURE-CRITICISM.

Ruskin's Modern Painters. Vols. I. II. III. IV. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1843-1856.

Pre-Raphaelitism. By the Author of "Modern Painters." London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1851.

Notes on some of the principal Pictures exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy and Society of Painters in Water-Colours. By John Ruskin, M.A. No. I., 1855; No. II., 1856. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.

"Modern Painters." Quarterly Review for March 1856.

John Murray.

"Ruskinism." Longmans.

Edinburgh Review for April 1856.

London:

London :

Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts-the Eighty-eighth.

Les Beaux Arts en Europe, 1855. Théophile Gautier. Paris: Michel Lévy. 1855-1856.

Handbook for Young Painters. By C. R. Leslie, R.A. London: Murray, 1855.

THERE is just now an unwonted stir in the world of fine art. That region of serener air is perturbed with storms, and shaken

with horrid din of war. The spirit of Strife-not satisfied with arming nation against nation, in north and east-has taken to set artists and art-critics by the ears:

The collision of jarring schools is fierce in proportion to the normal peacefulness of the combatants. Palettes clash and maulsticks rattle as loud as ever rang shield on shield and lance against lance along a Homeric battle-field. Mr. Ruskin-an Orlando Furioso of art-charges the old masters and the modern academies, pen in one hand, pencil and etching-point in the other. Academicians, in the black armour of Quarterly and Edinburgh reviewers, make fierce onslaught on Mr. Ruskin. Meanwhile, earnest students, eager buyers, and humble spectators of pictures—the Achivi of these delirious kings-look on, puzzled and perplexed between conflicting claims and antagonistic principles, and find no guidance either of their practice, their purchases, or their principles. It is not our intention to descend into this battle of the pictures as an ally of either side, or even, New-Jerseyman fashion, as a combatant "on our own hook." We wish rather to attempt the office of mediator—conscious, as we are, of the lot that usually attends those who bring the olive-branch. But even if it should not be our fate to win a hearing-much more to part the enraged fighters-at least we may pick up off the field some of the truths which each has been hurling at the other, and turn them to better account than stabbing reputations, and bringing down great names, contemporary or classical.

It is true that all evil has its counterpoise. As thunderstorms clear the air, and wars quicken the stagnation and rub off the rust of peace, so the present strife in art has its hopefulness as a sign, and its usefulness as an agent. It shows that there is life both in our painters and our critics of painting, and it quickens for work the pencils of the one and the pens of the other. We never remember a time in which painters of established reputation strove more energetically to justify their fame, in which aspirants for distinction in painting laboured more studiously to win it, or in which worthy efforts in art were more worthily estimated-of course, out of the daily newspapers. But among the innovators whose work has awakened the present strife, the critic preceded the craftsman. Mr. Ruskin's pen was Pre-Raphaelite before the pencils of Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais. These young men invented the name; but Mr. Ruskin might have been their guide to the aims it symbolises, their encourager

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to the effort it describes. The first edition of the first volume of Modern Painters appeared, we believe, in 1843;* though we have not a copy accessible to verify the date by. At that time Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais were still students of the Academy. It was not till 1848 that the latter first excited attention by his large picture from the Isabella of Keats-though he had previously sent in a huge conventional canvas of "the Widow's Mite" to the Westminster-Hall competition for painting in oil.† Rossetti's "Education of the Virgin" we remember to have admired, about the same time, in the first so-called "free" exhibition in St. George's Gallery, at Hyde Park Corner. And Mr. Hunt's large composition from the Two Gentlemen of Verona belongs, if we recollect aright, to 1849.

We have no means of knowing how far the early practice of these remarkable young painters was prompted by Mr. Ruskin's first volume. But from dates and internal evidence, we should be inclined to refer it mainly to the influence of that volume, which closed with a piece of advice involving the very essence of Ruskinism. In it he tells our young artists that "they should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her labouriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing."

Now Mr. Ruskin assuredly was not the first teacher of art who had sent the young artist" to nature." That had been the universal direction of all the lecturers on painting since the foundation of the Academy. But the direction in their mouths had been coupled with stringent cautions. To "select nothing" was the very last precept that would have been ventured on from an academic chair. When the academic professor sent his students to nature, he took care to insist on their first coming to him for spectacles through which to look at her. Selection and combination were urged to the full as much as study of nature. And if the student of our own day, when told to "study nature," turned from the precepts of his teacher to his practice, he found himself in presence of a huge contradiction. Constable stood

"Eight years ago, on the close of the first volume of Modern Painters, I ventured to give the following advice to the young artists of England."—Ruskin's Preface to Pre-Raphaelitism, published in 1851.

†This work, remarkable as the production of a boy of some seventeen, is, or was lately, in the possession of Mr. White, Art-publisher, 7 Maddox Street, Bond Street.

We have since learnt, from unquestionable authority, that the original PreRaphaelites were not inspired by the first volume of Modern Painters. The coincidence in the appearance of the theory, and the adoption of the practice of pure study from nature is all the more remarkable. Mr. Ruskin's words may be used to explain Pre-Raphaelite pictures just as well as if he had inspired the painters of them.

alone in the Academy as the sturdy champion of English landscape-neither gilt by the sun of Claude nor embrowned by the twilight of Gaspar Poussin; and Constable's pictures hung unsold on the walls of his painting-room. Turner was beyond students' comprehension: the reverent wondered, the irreverent scoffed, before his mysterious canvases. Wilson was more Italian than English; Gainsborough was English all over; but both were of the past; and the student, at the outset of his career, is always mainly amenable to contemporary influences.

Mr. Ruskin was the first authoritative writer on art who sent the student to the teaching of nature-pure et simple. The scholar was to "select nothing" among the many models that mighty mistress poured out before him. "Selection" was for the master in art, and not for the learner. The faculty of choice of combination-of reproduction-would grow up in the student according to his strength and humbleness. As the tree was, such would be the fruit-grapes from the vine, wild-plums from the sloe; but some fruit from every tree left to the kindly nursing of air and sun, the wholesome food of dew and rain and juices of the earth. The only influences to be feared were those of gardener and horticulturist; not that these, if wise and humble, might not aid the blossoming of flower and the bearing of tree; but the chances were that the florist might kill all his dahlias in the attempt to produce a blue one, and the arborist be possessed by a Chinese fancy for making potted dwarfs out of the young giants of field or forest.

One great contrast between Academy-lectures and Mr. Ruskin's books could not fail to strike the thoughtful student. His professor talked to him about art, its great masters, their works, and the laws of their working; Mr. Ruskin about nature, its mighty manifestations, their modes, and the causes of them. The former sent him to the gallery and painting-room; the other to the plains, the mountains, the forests, and the sea. The art of the one seemed to divide dominion with nature; the art of the other was sternly called to account as nature's servant and sworn interpreter. In proportion as God's work is vaster and grander than man's, it exercises at once repulsion and attraction on those within the sphere of its influence. It repels by manysidedness and mystery; it attracts by grandeur and completeness. Whatever introduces law into its mighty maze, and furnishes a clue to its inner meaning, increases this attractive power, and diminishes. that repulsive force. Mr. Ruskin has, for some fourteen years past, aimed at this with a zcal that has been vouchsafed to few, a knowledge rarely equalled, an eloquence seldom surpassed, and an industry that has never faltered. He has shown the soul underlying the ribs of death in the laws that regulate the deli

cate curvatures of the primal granite, the great heart that pulses in the ebbing and flowing of the sea, the love that clothes the meadows with delight, the unity that gives beauty to man and beast, to forest tree and wayside weed. In one word, he has preached God in the physical world, and proclaimed, with a voice of power, that all which we worship in art and love in nature is typical of God's attributes-His infinity, His comprehensiveness, His permanence, justice, energy, and law.

Is it either wonder or pity that such a gospel has found believers-urged as it has been with all the authoritative force of conviction, and all the seductive graces of style-contrasted, moreover, with such chaff and husks as academies have ever set before their learners? Is it any wonder if these disciples have been among the most capable and thoughtful of those who listened to the preacher? But Mr. Ruskin's teaching is preeminently the teaching of scholars. His art-criticism-in so far as it deals with particular schools, masters, and pictures—is the least part of it. His power has been that of a guide to nature. Once introduced to that school-with such a key to the language of its text-books and such discipline of mind and eye as his writings can give-Mr. Ruskin hands over the student to the great volume of the outward world, and bids him read reverently therein, and copy faithfully and submissively from the living emblazonments of its fair and various pages.

Such, as it seems to us, in a broad and general way, is the work which Mr. Ruskin has proposed to himself, and has in great measure achieved. But not from this point of view has he been judged. The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews have opened their pages to two long articles in which Mr. Ruskin is attacked with a fierceness which we had hoped was banished from respectable periodical literature. Throughout these papers he is assailed as an unsound theoriser about art and an untrustworthy critic of pictures. But in neither is there any attempt to estimate him as a guide of art-students to nature. The bitter hostility of both the reviewers to the author of Modern Painters may explain their choice of the point of view from which they pass judgment on Mr. Ruskin's teaching. As it was their aim to wound, they have selected the enemy's weakest points. It must be confessed that the Oxford graduate, in his diffuse and passionate treatment of his theme, lays himself singularly open to attacks which he provokes as much by his unmeasured praise of some painters as by his towering contempt and savage denunciation of others. Totally intent on the immediate subject of his chapter, he scorns any attempt at elaborate reconcilement of assertions which, read separately, contradict each other. The article in the Edinburgh Review is a string of such appa