while length of face, and gravity of demeanour, and the habit of frowning upon all joyous effusion of spirits, are right. This, we repeat, is simply to reverse the law of nature and of Scripture, affirmed with joyous acclaim by the flowers of the field and the birds of the woodland, and by the reason, the heart, the conscience of man. It has gone so far, that most people of earnest personal religion find the spirituality of their affections disturbed by that very "music and dancing," to which Christ referred as the appropriate methods of evincing joy. Herein lies the difficulty of amendment; for the spirituality of the soul's life, the preservation of communion with God in the heart, must not, on any account, be put in jeopardy. At lowest, however, the seriousness of the error ought to be perceived, and our children ought to be taught that in beauty of form, of colour, of motion, with all its concomitants of gaiety, brilliancy and gladness, there is no harm but much of good. The Puritan Churches have of late years been throwing off the contracted ideas of their ancestry; and it is not now generally thought sinful to have respect to the principles of good taste in erecting places of worship and in conducting service. A great advance in ideas on this subject has taken place, and we may confidently expect it to continue.

A Protestant school of art, in the strictest sense of the word, that is a school of art devoted to the erection of Protestant churches, or to the adornment of Protestant worship, we do not expect or wish to see. The art of Protestantism need have hardly any sacerdotal or ecclesiastical character; it requires only to be a great and pure art, depicting the beauties of God's world, the heroisms of human character and history, and finding certain of its grandest themes in the province of religion, in order to confer inexpressible benefits on the Protestant Churches. The one thing needful is, that the lamentable notion that there is something Unchristian in beauty and brightness should be done away with.

The analogy which we have traced from the world of nature into the world of man, in the three provinces of individual, domestic. and ecclesiastical life, does not fail when we enter the region of national existence. But in this province it is not possible to take a step in considering the relation of beauty to life, without finding ourselves confronted by certain questions of extremest difficulty, questions which open into the whole subject of modes of labour and the ends and characteristics of national prosperity-questions on which poets, philosophers, and political economists have knocked their heads together any time this century, and that without yet striking out from the concussion a very clear light of guidance for plain people. The poets and the poetical philosophers have startled the economists by vague notions relating to the organization of labour, and by a manifest distrust in, and dislike to, those mechanical powers

of steam and machinery, which have given so marked a character to the present age. The economists, on the other hand, have had tacitly or expressly against them a large proportion of the richer and nobler mind among us, on account of the flippant dogmatism with which they assert that modern progress in wealth and population must imply an advancement in all true national prosperity, and of an evident deadness, on their part, to those beautifying influences for which every tender, high, and fine-strung nature longs, as for the dropping of a heavenly dew in the world-wilderness. Both the poets and the economists are partly in the right; neither appear to have emerged into the open azure of a complete truth. The poets,— Southey, Wordsworth, Ruskin, and their peers-are essentially and irrefragably correct in their main position, that human life, deprived of all presence and influence of the Beautiful, is in an abnormal, incomplete, and, on the whole, disastrous condition. Were it otherwise, the thing would be a contradiction to the whole analogy of nature, and the poets, who are such in virtue of having a finer ear than ordinary men for truths embodied in nature's harmonies and cadences, are vested with authority to proclaim that satisfaction of the ruder animal wants of man is not necessarily a guarantee of his well-being as a compound existence, not only physical, but mental, moral, and spiritual. All idea, however,-nay, all possible suggestion of idea that the mechanical powers which have armed mankind with new weapons in this century, are in themselves evil, and ought to be dispensed with, is to be condemned.

When we drive out from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses,
Are we greater than our fathers, who led black ones by the mane?

Not necessarily, most noble poetess, though we ought to be, since every new power gained by man is fitted and intended by God to be a stepping-stone towards elevation and improvement of his whole being. Not necessarily, we say; the utilitarian powers may steal a march upon us, and spread an ugliness over the field of life which cannot fail to be pernicious to the human being. The desolation which triumphant iron and fire, when the whole domain of life is given up to them, may produce, is pourtrayed, in its physical aspect, by Mr. Ruskin, in this account of a walk in the neighbourhood of a manufacturing town in Yorkshire :-"Just outside the town I came upon an old English cottage, or mansion,-I hardly know which to call it,-set close under the hill, and beside the river, perhaps built Bomewhere in the Charles' times, with mullioned windows and a low arched porch, round which, in the little triangular garden, one can imagine the family as they used to sit in old summer times, the ripple of the river heard faintly through the sweetbriar hedge, and

the sheep on the far-off wolds shining in the evening sunlight. There, uninhabited for many and many a year, it had been left in an unregarded havoc of ruin; the garden-gate still hung loose to its latch; the garden blighted utterly into a field of ashes, not even a weed taking root there; the roof torn into shapeless rents; the shutters hanging about the windows in rags of rotten wood; before its gate, the stream which had gladdened it now soaking slowly by, black as ebony, and thick with curdling scum; the bank above it trodden into unctuous, sooty slime; far in front of it, between it and the old hills, the furnaces of the city foaming forth perpetual plague of sulphurous darkness; the volumes of their storm-clouds coiling low over a waste of grassless fields, fenced from each other, not by hedges, but by slabs of square stone, like gravestones, riveted together with iron." This picture, drawn as it is with inimitable power, is not exaggerated, and no amount of sophistical reasoning could si lence the authoritative and irreversible decision by the healthful mind that such a state of things is inconsistent with the real well-being of men. If we look attentively, we shall find that amid all the populous ness and productivity of the most active manufacturing districts, nature has not forgotten her law that an abnegation of beauty is an abnegation of the finest essence of prosperity, of the best elements of spiritual civilization. The want of the beautifying influences in those districts is attested by the hardening of the mind, by a torpor and rigidity of feeling, by an insensibility to all that is tender and refined, by an incapacity for high spiritual aspiration. The merely logical faculties of the mind are vigorous, perhaps morbidly vigo rous; but no sward clothes the rocks, no pool of soft water remains on it to reflect the stars of heaven. The state of mind hence resulting is strongly depicted by Mrs. Gaskell in the opening chapters of her biography of Charlotte Bronte; its characteristic is bare and rugged strength, without delicacy or tenderness. It is also an undoubted fact that in the manufacturing districts, where the mental action seems, in its cold, emotionless, metallic logic, to correspond to the action of the machinery by which and amid which the people live, the prevalence of Atheism is exceptionally great. We have perfect confidence in imputing the fact to such a condition of things as Mr. Ruskin describes. Atheism is the logic of despair. Put a man into a condition in which he can be an atheist, and all your reasoning will have slight power to prevent his becoming such. God is light; darken the house of life with a profound and inhuman darkness, and you cannot see God. Take one look round this St. Giles's," said the London atheist," and it will show you that there is no God." And this darkening of the sphere of existence is most expressly and literally effected by excluding from life the elements and influences of beauty. By the mere fact that beauty can be dis

criminated from use, that the blue and crimson of the clouds are not required in watering the earth, that the curve and spring of the bonghs and the witching green of the foliage are not used in building ship or dwelling, that the flowers have no mission but to be admired, the idea is suggested to the mind that a Being exists and has made the world, who has respect to higher aspirations than those of man's animal frame, that man is intended to contemplate as well as to use, and that what has no direct connection with his bodily life 8 connected with a spiritual life above it and beyond. There is a still deeper truth than this, a truth which we have not space at present to investigate, but which is the final and demonstrative proof that atheism in man is the strictly correspondent phenomenon, the scientific reflex, of a state of life from which beauty is absent. Beauty, throughout nature, is the love-producing element. Strictly speaking, beauty, physical or moral, is the one thing which we love. It is the God's touch which calls out the highest note in the music of our nature, and we believe in God, not through reason, but through love. Hence, if beauty is removed absolutely from our sight, if the eye never beholds the light of spring on cherry-blossom or lilac-bloom, if the human lip and cheek are never seen without the stain of smoke, if so much as a pure sunbeam never penetrates for as to wet roof or ivied gable, the sense of a Divine Love in the world, manifesting itself in beauty, and evoking, in glad response, the acknowledgment of his presence in love and in faith, cannot be

felt.

Beauty, then, we conclude, is necessary to the right prosperity of the national existence, as it is to the well-being of individuals, families, and Churches. The qustion how beauty can be reconciled with the conditions of existence in the mechanical age, however difficult it may be, must not be evaded. It is essentially to this problem that Mr. Ruskin has been attempting to furnish a solution, in his papers on what certainly, as constituted by him, would be a new science of political economy. His aim is to point out how the nobleness of man's higher life, the attributes of his moral and spiritual nature, may be allied with the trading and manufacturing conditions of modern life. As the greatest literary interpreter of the Beautiful that has ever appeared, his opinion on the subject is deserving of careful attention; but unhappily he has seen fit to begin by a contemptuous rejection of doctrines in political economy which have long and justly been matter of universal assent; and the extent to which he would invoke governmental action in the case is, we think, at variance with those irresistible tendencies of the time, which the practical statesman may direct, but must not contradict. It is encouraging that the evil is being materially alleviated by the intelligent philanthropy of public men; and the practical view of the case is that, through the following on the part of rich men of such examples as Sir Frank Crossley's in

bestowing a people's park on the town of Halifax, through the suppression, by rigorous sanitary enactments, of all suppressible foulness of smoke or refuse, and through the perception by the Legislature of their duty to prevent, so far as is possible, such lamentable, pernicious, and irremediable destruction of beauty in our towns as has been effected in London by the metropolitan system of railways, such influences of beauty may be combined with our modern manufacturing and commercial existence, as will remove the reproach of ugliness from our mechanical power, and call back the light of God into our national house of life.

We have now ascertained, or at least put the reader in a position to ascertain, the place and importance of the Beautiful in the world of nature and in the world of man. A scientific basis is thus procured for enquiries of a more particular kind respecting the value, in human culture, of an acquaintance with the Beautiful in nature and in art. These involve not only the question of how the study of the Beautiful acts in quickening and refining the mental faculties, but that of the whole moral influence of art, viewed practically and with regard to objections which are urged by many upon the subject. The theme will more than suffice for another article.

TOPICS OF THE MONTH.

THE MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCE OF WALES has clearly been the event of the month. Never had any young lady under heaven so magnificent a reception as that which was given to the Princess Alexandra on the seventh of March. From the Nore to Windsor Castle there was one uninterrupted series of triumphs in her honour. No small effort of mind is requisite to comprehend the whole vista of glorification along which she passed on that memorable day, and no small measure of firmness must have been requisite in order to endure it. Landing on the flower-strewn pier at Gravesend; amidst the salutes of the iron war-ships of England, she passed under arch after arch of festoons to the North-Kent Railway. Every station was dressed in laurels, and crowded with eager spectators, ready to burst into shouts of welcome as the train slowly advanced on its journey. The great terminus of the Bricklayers' Arms was converted into one vast overarching bower of evergreens and exotic flowers. Through Southwark her course was a prolonged ovation from the commonalty. On London Bridge the splendour of her reception reached its climax. On each side the

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