yet merit the rank of masterpieces in "London Exhibitions." The lectures of Reynolds, of Fuseli, and of Barry, still instruct, not to say confute, our "London Critics." We therefore trust that the Royal Academy of this country, mindful of its position and vocation, will rightly guide and guard the arts intrusted

to its keeping-that while it gives honourable position to rising merit, however eccentric, it will uphold in their integrity those canons and observances of art, inherent as the fundamental principles in human nature, universal as the common experience of mankind.

Nor very long ago we spent, perforce, an idle summer-day in one of the most important of our English cathedral towns. An idle summerday looks like pleasure; let whoso will fill it up with the glorious glowing sunshine-the languid luxurious trees, refreshing themselves with that rustle and twink of leaves which cools the wayfarer by sound and imagination, as much as the real shadow-the drowsy noonday hum, in which every sound is soft-the skies bluer than blue eyes, the clouds whiter than snow, but everything so steeped in light that-strange result, but true, as every one may prove in this July weather-the whole landscape rather loses than gains colourthe fields fall off in softened shades of brown, and the woods, folding over each other in those soft slopes, take a pale ashen tint, as if every tree, like the willow, had a lining to its leaves. Any one who pleases can imagine this; also any one may imagine the sultry dusty glare which is about the environs of the country town-the sunny side of the High Street, where the shops have all their blinds on, and everybody is out of sight; and the shady side, where happier shopkeepers water the flags and lounge at the doors in tantalising enjoyment. This summer day, however, was not a pleasure-day to ourselves. We had one small piece of business to do, occupying about an hour; we knew no one, and having accomplished our solitary object, had some five or six hours to wait for the homely conveyance which had brought us thither. Also the day was too hot for any

great energy either of body or mind. We were a little afraid of our own thoughts, which were busy with grievous matters, very far apart from this present writing, and had with us the restless company of a child. So sight-seeing was rather out of our rôle for the moment. We were too languid in interest to care even for the cathedral, the echoing solemn nave of which our small companion was more awed than pleased with. Our alternative was not a very dignified one; we invested a sixpence in a most miscellaneous and varied collection of literature, and retired with the small heroine who loved the living daisies outside better than the dead effigies within, to the verdant turf of the cathedral close.

There it stood, rising up grey against the sky, with all its clustered crowd of chapels, its little turretspires thronging upward, its rounded, sheltered, protected apse, where, in the innermost repose and quietness, stood the most sacred altar of the old faith--and the fair old tower, too noble in its delicate proportion to take the full credit of its stature; grey and cool and old, with an ashen tint of age upon its majesty, rising pale upon the noonday skies-a solitary patriarchal presence, silent and half sad, more like a work of nature than a work of man. Around it, quiet, high, old brick houses, with a background of gardens, too wealthy and sunny and warm for the wintriest December to chill; and with trim greensward, and big grave elms, and sunny roads lying between their reverend and half-monastic dignity

and the glory of the old church, which does not look monastic, but everlasting; the air, still as a summer noon could make it-sometimes a passing step-sometimes a child's voice sometimes a breath of wind rustling among the elm trees, and dropping down upon us in their shadow a whisper that somewhere near blossoms an unseen lime. Nobody looks out from the rows of calm windows in those peaceful old houses-no door is closed or opened to disturb the echoes; the whole close looks as still as if thus it had ever been, and always would be. Does life go on there as it goes elsewhere? one wonders. Under those placid roofs is the air ever athrob with passions or with sorrows, or is this the unreachable halcyon land, where no storms can come? Thinking which thoughts, we strewed upon the grass around us, while our little companion filled her basket with daisies, our sixpenny store of literature, strangely incongruous with the scene. Grave literature and learning, decorum and dig nity, the authorities of society, stood represented in those grave old houses, from which no careless human eye looked out; and scattered over the daisies, with the wind among their leaves, lay the unauthoritative, undignified, unlearned broadsheets, which represent literature to a great portion of our country people, despite of all the better provision made for their pleasure. There could not possibly be a more marked or total contrast than between the object of our immediate attention and the scene.

Yet the contrast of itself was not without its suggestion. Progress is something more than the cant of the age; according to its fashion, and within its possible limits, it is as great a reality as can well be supposed. We have advanced, and are advancing, beyond the wildest dreams of our forefathers. The only error we make in our self-congratulations, is that of imagining that the laws of progress are universal, and that everything in earth, if not in heaven, is equally subject to them. But there are two grand exceptions to be made to these principles. One unknown material force after another develops out of this gigantic world,

the depths of which are fully explored only by the eye of their Maker; but it is different with that human soul which dwells and reigns, in uncomprehending sovereignty, over this universe of marvels. The face of the earth has changed a hundred times, but his face is still like Adam's. Governments, customs, the whole tenor of life, have undergone a thousand revolutions yet his is the self-same restless soul which plucked the apple in Paradise, and fled into the covert to escape from the God it had disobeyed. When all the world whirls and changes, one inconstant, inconsistent, unexplainable being remains always the same. There are no new capabilities to be found out in him, no undiscovered depths from which science can conjure up forces and powers unknown. Progress is but a word for this last and greatest of God's works, meaning what goes on outside of him -the story of the accessories by which he is surrounded. That nature which was only perfect in the earliest days of its earliest possessor, and which will be perfect again only when the world's full chronicle is completed, makes no progress. Comforts increase, power grows, science expands and widens, but the man who is in the midst of all does not change.

Progress rules over science, over manufactures, over all the ingenuities and wisdoms of the race. There is not a workman in existence so perfect but he may learn something of which his work shall be the better. The only things which escape this wide rule of increase are the creative art and the individual man. Here they stand before our eyes, in a strange unvarying juxtaposition. It is so many hundred years since, chapel by chapel, and pile on pile, that fair old minster rose into the poetic perfection of its present being; since then the world has made unthought-of progress. Yet all the sculptors who do or do not design national monuments never to be erected, and all the architects who plan public offices, possibly never to be built, could not, did they club their wits together, surpass this labour of the unenlightened ages, or rear a statelier tabernacle for the

purer faith. Heaven send they did but half as well! Whereas, here, on the other hand, lie rustling upon the fresh grass these dreary sheets of printed paper, flimsy pages, made to kindle fires withal to-morrow; which prove to us, beyond the possibility of doubting, that good sense, good thought, truth, excellence, or refinement of any kind, are by no means included in what is called the spread of literature, and that the human mind has made no particular advance in any direction, to judge from the mental condition of those multitudes of people who find their weekly delectation in publications such as these.

upon us.

No, the lesser arts progress, but the greater art does not share in the advancement. We print a great deal better than we used to do, but the matter to be printed shows by no means a corresponding improvement. It is three hundred years, or thereabout, since we had our Shakespeare, and such another has not come again. We can no more produce another Hamlet, than we can build another cathedral like that at Canterbury. We can cultivate the lesser gilts which we have, but we can put no machinery in motion to originate the greater one, which is not bestowed No amount of information, no extent of culture, can confer the living spark of genius, on the one hand, or of understanding on the other. These workmen hanging on their perilous scaffolds high up you der among the niched and sculptured buttresses, where they do their "restorations," are familiar with a host of modern conveniences which would have been little less than miraculous to the old brothers of their craft who first laid these stones together; but we doubt much if the legends of the saints were less wholesome mental fare than the penny papers and penny periodicals which have taken their place in these days. It is a fine thing to talk of the spread of education, the diffusion of knowledge, the constantly increasing extent of "reading for the million." If reading of itself were a virtuous and improving exercise, as innocent people once considered it, we too might echo the exultation with which a

superficial sentiment regards the extending bulk of literature; but when we regard the matter with eyes less arbitrary, we are obliged to confess that it impresses us with a very doubtful satisfaction. True, these gifts of reading and writing are more likely to justify Dogberry's conclusion in respect to them nowadays than ever before. True, every kind of publication has increased tenfold; and there is scarcely a house or a room in the country, down to the very boundary-line where poverty subsides into want, or rather where want meets destitution, in which something readable is not to be found. This is no small thing to say; and it is not wonderful that theorists, who take this simple fact for a foundation, should grow eloquent upon the diffusion of literature, and all its humanising influences. But reading is not always a humaniser; and it will scarcely do to pat our public on the head, as the old wives used to pat the cottage student of ten who scorched his flaxen hair by the fire o' nights, bent double over Captain Cook's Voyages or Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps, after all, to be "fond of its book" is no such astonishing recommendation to our many-headed prot-gé as one might suppose at the first glance-perhaps even a peep into the book which this big reader loves might not be inappropriate, before we give full course to our raptures. In the days when books were ponderous and readers few, it was only just to give the student credit for mental powers more active and more clear than those of his neighbours, who knew no intellectual appetite. Now, however, a stricter standard is necessary. There is abundance of reading in these days which requires no intellect: nay, we may go farther; to require no intellect is merely a negative; there are publications popular in this enlightened nineteenth century which reject the aid of mind more distinctly still-wastes of print, which nothing possessing intellect could venture on-wildernesses of words, where everything resembling sense is lost beyond description or recovery. Let us give the masses all credit for their gift of reading;

but before we glorify ourselves over the march of intelligence, let us pause first to look into their books. These unfortunate masses! When first the schoolmaster began to be abroad, how tenderly we took care of the improvement of their minds, and how zealously exerted ourselves to make literature a universal dominie, graciously enlightening the neophyte on every subject under heaven! Does anybody remember now the Societies for the Diffusion of Knowledge the Penny Magazines and Cyclopædias through which the streams of useful information fell benignly upon the lower orders ?— how we laboured to bring ourselves down to the capacity of that unknown intelligence, the working man!—how we benevolently volunteered to amuse him in a profitable and edifying way, by histories and descriptions of the ingenious crafts, and nice accounts of how they make pins, and laces, and china, or how a steam-engine is put together! What a delightful ideal dwelt then in our inexperienced thoughts! Would any one have supposed that this intellectual creation, austerely brought up upon facts and figures, could ever own a guilty longing for stories, or verses, or other such amusements of a frivolous race? The idea was insulting to all our hopes and exertions; and when, by-and-by, the horrid numerals of a statistical account disclosed to us the fatal certainty that the multitude, like ourselves, loved amusement better than instruction that working men, too, preferred Guy Mannering to the Novum Organum, and that Byron was more to the purpose than Bacon even in the library of a mechanics' institute the chill of disappointed expectation consequent upon the discovery is not to be described. So the penny cyclopædias dropped one by one into oblivion, and nobody missed them; and lo, rushing into the empty space, the mushroom growth of a sudden impulse, rapid and multitudinous to meet the occasion, came springing up a host of penny magazines-spontaneous and natural publications, which professed no artificial mission, and aimed at no class-improvement, but were the

simple supply of an existing demand

-wares such as the customer wanted, and the market was suitable for. The Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge placed a wooden image of the most severe and edifying demeanour as the representative of literature to the multitude; but the multitude has avenged itself-here is the flesh and blood which has mounted upon the pedestal of useful information. Let us look at this natural index of the taste of the masses, and learn by their own assistance what that is which satisfies them best.

There are few words so difficult to define as that term literature, which is in everybody's mouth. To confine its meaning to that which we call literature, is about as exclusive and limited a notion as it is to confine that other term society to the fashionable world, which claims the name in sublime disdain of all competitors. Almost as numerous as the distinct "circles which, upward to the highest haut monde, and downwards to the genteelest coterie of a village, each calls itself by the all-comprehending name, are the widespread oligarchies and democracies of that Republic of Letters, which, like most other republics, claims throughout its ranks a noisy equality, pleasantly varied by the arrogance of individual despotisms. Let us not delude ourselves with the idea that literature is fully represented by that small central body of its forces of whom everybody knows every individual name. Nay, not everybody

only everybody who is anybodynot the everybody who reads the London Journal and the Family Herald. That eminent group, with which we at least do ourselves the credit to claim acquaintance, are only the chance oligarchs who stand up head and shoulders above the mass of their co-aspirants-whom, by virtue of that accident of stature, other countries see over our cliffs and channels, whom above a certain level of society it is impossible to avoid seeing-nay, even necessary and inevitable to know something of

and whose works are forming the last ring in that big old tree called English literature. But it matters

very little to the people in the valley whether a man stands on the top of the hill or only on the side of itnay, for all their purposes, the lowest slope, being nearest, is the best; and so in the underground, quite out of sight and ken of the heroes, spreads thick and darkly an undiscriminated multitude-undiscriminated by the critics, by the authorities, by the general vision, but widely visible to individual eyes, to admiring coteries, and multitudinous lower classes, who buy, and read, and praise, and encourage, and, under the veil of their own obscurity, bestow a certain singular low-lying Jack-o'-lantern celebrity, which nobody out of these regions is aware of, and which is the oddest travestie and paraphrase of fame. Some of these are religious writers, who perhaps of all others address the largest and most mixed community; some are eccentrics, moving in queer corners of their own, with a snug little audience close about them, and a little set of doetrines, arguments, and quarrels, "haill o' my ain, and nane o' my neighhours," which grow into the most magnificent grandiloquence of proportions by dint of being contemplated without intermission and very close at hand; and some are neither eccentric nor religious, neither witty nor eloquent, neither political nor philanthropical, but simply and solely the weekly amusers of that multitudinous public which opens its own mind to us, all unawares and unconsciously, by means of those penny papers not one of which says a syllable about the manners or likings of its audience in the way of description, but which, every one, help us to the geography of that strange region where such things as themselves can grow and flourish.

Perhaps for mere amusement, the periodical eccentrics of literature, the writers, vehemently inspired with" an object," and continually straining their eyes upon that to the exclusion of all the world beside, are the most inviting; but we will not be tempted aside, in the first place at least, even by the virtuous earnestness of Notes and Queries, or the sublime and absorbed devotion of the Ecclesiolo gist. These illustrate a very patent

and unquestionable truth-which is, that a very small matter, placed close before an average pair of human eyes, and gazed at zealously and without intermission, will very soon eclipse the very mountains and seas in magnitude, and throw its shadow upon both earth and heaven. But we find a larger, a less comprehensible, and a more important field in the periodicals printed and published for the amusement of the many, without either object or mission separate from this. We should be afraid to pretend to know even the titles of all these distinguished serials—still less could we presumptuously venture to assume an acquaintance with the gifted contributors who secure their popularity; but the general aspect of these publications is certainly as different as can be conceived from the penny cyclopædias. Their useful information is like Falstaff's halfpennyworth of bread: the amount of sack-which, however, is not sack, but that poor creature small-beeris quite preposterous and intolerable. There are stories to begin with, stories to end with, and stories in the middle. Two serial tales, continued from week to week, is a moderate allowance for one of those twelve-page broadsheets; and even the little make-weights of history with which some of them ballast their lighter wares, have to be enlivened by an anecdote or a melodramatic scene. One can perceive pretty well at a glance that it is not instruction which the multitude demands most loudly, and that the popular mind does not by nature incline towards philosophy, even should it be the philosophy of the steam-engine, for the relaxation of its leisure hours. No; one genuine natural appetite, at least, if nothing more, displays itself most prominently in this reading for the million." It is that love of stories which distinguishes all primitive minds, and which has its strongest development in savages and children. No disparagement to our friends of the multitude. They, too, share with the children and the savages a certain absolute and first-hand contact with things and facts, which throws out philosophy. Events great and grievous come upon them as upon their social