spring. It is, by the light, the beginning of the day, as well as of the year, and the freshness that is found in both seasons, has been taken to typify the new thought and feeling which is expressed in the face of the Father of the English Reformation. A fresh era has opened for the Church and for the world. Old things have already passed away, at any rate in the scene before us. Wickliffe looks like a leader, and he is represented in the act of distributing copies of the Bible amongst some of his followers, and adjuring them to take it as a lamp to their feet and a light to their path, as they go everywhere and preach the Gospel. His disciples seem to be as ready to undertake the commission as he is to give it. They are like-minded, and their fellowship of faith and feeling gives the unity to the picture. Mr. Yeames has been obliged to lower the tone of his colour, and to express the intensity of his subject by departing from his usual style, and giving a greater hardness to his faces and figures. He has, of course, prejudiced his popularity by his truthfulness.

There is another picture (570) where Luther and Melancthon are found in a room, leaning over a desk and consulting together about some passage of Scripture. A woman and child (Luther's wife, we suppose), very imperfectly painted, occupies the foreground. We know what is meant to be understood, but we refuse to listen to Mr. Wallis. Two things cannot be done at once. We are obliged by the painter himself to look at the clever reproduction of the old glass in the panes of the window, and at the cat and the kittens in the foreground.

M. Tourrier, in his "Matins" (433), looks at the superstitions which have led so many to protest, and finds, as many before him have done, a subject for the display of humour. After touching wood engraving, he has taken again to his brush; and we have the solidly-painted Westminster Cloisters and the file of Capuchins (all feeling the cold, but each in his own way) going barefoot through the snow. The figures, pictorially, are too much of the same hue with the building which forms their background. The Times attributes the thorough and well-understood workmanship, the labour that is never obtruded, the keen sense of character, and the subtle feeling for quiet colour, to French training. The artist is not a Frenchman, and has never studied in France.

Mr. Graham, in 659, follows en suite, and gives us what might be called "Parsons at Play." Some monks are in a meadow amusing themselves with a game at bowls. The forms and features of the holy fathers are treated for the purpose of ridicule, and the bowls are so placed by the painter as, on the one side, to form with the lines of the figures a pyramid, and, on the other side, the triangle which is so effective in a picture.

There are other reasons for being at the Academy by eight o'clock in the morning, besides the one which is so well known. We may so manage as to escape the crowd of people, but we cannot avoid the crowd of pictures. It will be wise, therefore, to give ourselves every chance, and if we come before we have seen or thought about anything we shall be likely to leave less confused and bewildered by the thousand and one appeals which have been made to the eye and the mind. We shall need both our eyes and all our wits, if we are to see anything where there are so many things to look at, and we may as well use our senses and our sense when they are at their brightest and best.

No one, however great a connoisseur he may profess to be, can see a single picture as it really is, when it is hung in the midst of others. Its individuality is lost in company. Works of art, as well as human beings, are different in society from what they are alone, and sometimes, like guests, they are very unfortunate in their neighbours.

Any one with ordinary common sense and a little consideration may understand the points of a picture; and if we make our annual visits to exhibitions opportunities for study we shall gradually be able to find out these points for ourselves, and be equal to criticise the criticisms which others may pass upon them. The world of art, like everything else that is human, is open to any and all. A man may understand anything that is meant for men, provided he uses the necessary means. Of course

we find in art, as in religion and other things, that there are those who have constituted themselves, or have been established by others, as authorities; but there is no necessity laid upon any to accept a canvas as a picture because it is hung on the line, any more than to believe a dogma is a truth because it is found in a creed. We may retain and use, if we will, the right of private judgment.

We need not, for instance, receive the authorized version of Shylock and Jessica (312) and read the passage from Shakespeare henceforth in the light of Mr. Cope's rendering. Mr. Horsley, R.A. (338), may introduce two English girls into a Spanish scene, and paint the one that is looking at you with ropy hair; a large space in the best part of the Middle Room may be allotted to 378, and it may be honoured, in addition, by half a page in the Catalogue, but neither of these pictures, though in high places, have any right to speak to you with authority. In the latter, "The Submission of the Emperor Barbarossa to Pope Alexander the Third," the background is a vaulted building, completely out of drawing. The Catalogue says that it accurately represents the actual scene in which the ceremony took place; but this attempt at correctness has not,

and never could have, any of the witchery of Roberts's interiors. He found that it was necessary to do wrong if he would be right, and adopted, of course incorrectly, two points of sight, one for the sake of the effect of his groups, and the other that the groined ceiling might appear to be far above them, working in the middle of his picture with that art which hides art.

A story is told of the present year the truth of which might be authenticated by either of the foregoing pictures, and others which, had we space, we might admit as witnesses. The porter, bringing in a picture and omitting to mention the name of the artist, and placing it before the judges, was told at once, and by all, to consign it to the lower regions. This, that, and the other glaring fault was simultaneously pointed out, and it would never have been where it is but for an after discovery that it was one of the works of the elect. We happened to have to pass through the cellar a day or two before the opening, and the sheeted dead stood in serried rows, hiding their faces, though having seen some of them on their easels we knew that they had no reason to be ashamed, and that they could not have been justly condemned.

All our readers will have heard by this time that this Exhibition is above the average, that is, of the few past years. It is not what it was. Many will have seen for themselves that the tide of Pre-Raphaelitism has gone down, but has left its traces. Some will perceive that an unsettled feeling pervades the artistic, as well as the political and religious worlds. Millais, for instance, gives an admirable portrait of a boy (236), with his hair cut short in front to keep it out of his eyes. Looking at it, as you are obliged to do, for he is looking at you, you notice that Millais has found that he cannot improve on the old portrait principle of graduating everything toward the face, and the face toward the eye. There is no reproduction here of the boy's clothes, and so you can see the boy. In his "Jephtha" (289) there is a mingled handling which may perhaps account for the unsatisfactory effect of this picture, and the divided judgment upon it. The father, like Agamemnon at the sacrifice of his daughter, hides his face, and you are beginning to feel with and for him, when you are led away by the imitation of porphyry in the pillar on the one side, and on the other by the large black face of the nurse, painted to the very life. Raphael constantly supported his principal figures in this way, and Mr. Millais may have noticed the plan in his recent studies in Italy, but the great master of composition used his perpendicular lines to lead the eye of the spectator to the chief object in the story he was telling, and having done this he kept it there. Mr. Millais shows us the lion skin and the buckler just as he shows us the

bedsteads and the bedclothes in his "Sleeping" (68) and Waking" (74). The expression of sleep in a child is happily caught, and we imagine that it was through fear of painting it out that the face is not finished more highly. The consequence is that you cannot see the child, however much you would like to do so, you are obliged to notice the pattern and the fringe of the counterpane. A birdcage hangs over the foot of the bed of the waking child, and it has been supposed that he is looking up at it. The eyes of the boy are, however, turned another way, He must be listening to a morning song.

We are sometimes twitted about the divisions in the Church, and the different handling that the same truth has received is often urged as an excuse for its rejection. Judging from what we see in this Exhibition, there is no act of uniformity in force. Sacred art is understood in different ways, and each artist has his own opinions. In the boneless and impossible St. Edmund (158) you have the embodiment (if we are justified in using a word that is so suggestive of substance) of those emasculated minds which ignore the existence of flesh and blood, and cause and effect. Mr. Dobson, A.R.A., has painted his "Christ" (298) from Blair's Sermons, and Mr. Armitage, A.R.A., with his wooden hand and the face in keeping with it, must have been inspired by the hard and ignorant representations of our Lord which we are sometimes fated to hear. The old subject of "Rebekah at the Well" (8) is given by Mr. Goodall, R.A., with a new reading, and we are reminded as we look at it of Dr. Stanley's Sinai and Palestine" or "The Jewish Church." We listen with fresh interest as he tells the old story. We see nothing of the conventional well. The strongly-painted pitcher in the foreground is a sufficient hint. The pitcher is repeated again and again, smaller and smaller, and you are taken out of the picture on the one side toward a city. You feel the air of the desert, and the worn limbs of the camels in the middle distance tell of travel. All the figures, even that of Rebekah, are in harmony with the country and the climate. It may be only fancy, but we seem to detect the craft and calculation of her family in the countenance of the woman. She is no girl. Her eyes are open, but she sees nothing. You are soon quite sure that she is not looking at you. It is one of those moments when the mind works with a fearful velocity. She is woman enough for the occasion. Her hand tells you that she has made up her mind. This is the moment chosen by the artist, and he has made you feel it by the strength that he has put into the delicate modelling of her wrist, which is outstretched that the bracelet may be fastened upon it that binds the agreement. "Eliezer" is full of holy

gratitude, and you travel out of the picture, helped by the lines back again to the place from whence he came.

There is no object, smaller or larger, of equal interest to the human countenance; hence portraits are always being painted, and if they be likenesses they are attractive to strangers as well as to friends. A portrait must be something more than a likeness to be a picture, and it is priceless when it is both. We have to thank Mr. Watts for our introduction to the Dean of Westminster (207). The painter has evidently intended his work to be characteristic and biographical, and gives the spectator, whether he has seen Dr. Stanley or not, the impression that he has attained his purpose. Had he wished to produce merely a picture, he would not have suffered the Dean to take what we suppose to be his accustomed seat and to sit in his accustomed manner. The drooping hands, hanging somewhat helplessly on the same line and in the same way, the shoulders thrown up by the elbows resting on the arms of his study chair, are as suggestive to us as the feeling that is found everywhere over the whole face. Exploring this new world, we find amongst other discoveries, an explanation of the difference in the minds and characters of the disciple and the master. Fraught as the Dean's features are with thought and conscientiousness, bearing visible traces of the great and good service he has rendered to his day, we miss the fire of the genius that glows in the eyes of Dr. Arnold, and the set mouth and the standing position which indicate the naturally resolute man.

Mrs. Seymour Egerton (82) has been, according to the Catalogue, represented by Mr. Watts as singing. It is perhaps impossible, apart from accessories, to render this effect in a solitary figure. You can paint a chorus, but not a solo. The likeness must necessarily be lost in the contortion of the facial muscles, and you are apt to wonder, as you hear no sound, why the portrait has its mouth open. The portrait of the lady that hangs in the same room (East) over Frith's masterpiece, and that of the other lady with the dogs grouped into a pyramid, are pictures. There is another portrait of a lady which seems to be both a likeness and a picture. Arresting our attention from our first entrance, we found ourselves obliged to turn to it whenever we passed through the room. We thought of the lines

I do believe that

I saw her heart in her face,

and wondered how it was that she could so lift up the light of her countenance on her portrait painter. The mystery was solved as we consulted the Catalogue, for we read:-" 499, Lady Rose Weigall.

H. Weigall."