don, or of special collections by single artists. These notices are uniformly well written, and have the air of intelligent and well-meant criticism; but one would think that with the disposal of the pictures would vanish the chief interest and value of the notices, and that, even in London, it was hardly worth while to collect them into a book. But that they should be reprinted in America is yet more strange; for they criticize pictures and statues which perhaps not a hundred Americans have ever seen. The only man who could make notices of pictures entertaining to those who had never seen them has unfortunately resigned his place. Mr. Palgrave, in reprinting, was doubtless led by Mr. Ruskin's example in his yearly "Notes on the Royal Academy's Exhibition," which were always delightful, whether we had ever heard the names of the painters or not: the heartiness of his praise, the vigor of his abuse, his exquisite wordpictures, and his sublime dogmatism, made it impossible not to read, from beginning to end, whatever he might choose to say. Sydney Smith was in his best mood when he declined reading the book he was to review, "because it prejudices one so, you know;" and there was to Ruskin's readers perhaps an advantage in knowing nothing of the pictures he criticized, since, having no prejudices to disturb our enjoyment, we could hear, with delightful indifference, Mr. Millais's latest masterpiece, for instance, set down as marking "not Fall, but Catastrophe," and some unheard-of aspirant elevated with judicial sternness to the place from which he was deposed. Mr. Palgrave's notes are much calmer and more dispassionate, but unfortunately they are a little dull. His praise and his blame are feeble, and have sometimes the look of proceeding, not so much from a strong interest in what he is doing, as from the necessity which is upon him of filling the predestined column in the next "Saturday Review."

From this criticism, however, we ought perhaps to except the latter half of the book, which has several very readable papers of general interest. Such are, for example, the slight biographical sketches of Dyce, William Hunt, Flaudrin, Thorwaldsen; the curious paper on "Japanese Art," that on "Lost Treasures," and some others. The best article in the book seems to us to be that on "Sculpture and Painting," in which the writer examines the peculiar difficulties which the former has to meet, aud which make it "the most arduous, and at the same time the most intellectual," of the Fine Arts; and explains the enormous disadvantage under which an artist labors who attempts to step from the practice of painting to that of sculp

ture.

Mr. Palgrave agrees with those critics who have maintained that, in Michael Angelo, "the profoundest of Christian painters was sacrificed (excepting the single instance of the Sistine Chapel) to an attempt to master sculpture."

Considerable space is given, throughout the book, to the position of sculpture in England. Mr. Palgrave is thoroughly convinced of what we suppose few Englishmen of taste would care to deny,—that the English sculpture of the present day is something to be rather wondered at than admired. He is very free in his remarks on the various aspirants for fame in this department, even though they write "R.A." after their names. Two military busts, by Mr. G. Adams, are said to "look more like caricatures on the profession, than monuments to the gallant originals." Baron Marochetti's statue of Lord Clive, at Shrewsbury, has "the attitude of a gentleman performing an eternal pas seul before all the market-women of the city." Mr. Durham's Prince Albert has "a left arm, for the anatomy of which only a compound fracture could account;" and, worst of all, "Mr. J. Adams, by a sort of inversion of Mr. Darwin's theory, appears to lie under the impression, that the human species is rapidly returning to the gorilla type, and has selected Mr. Gladstone, of all people in the world, as a leading instance of this process." All of which is, we dare say, very true, but savors more of the journalist than the teacher. This is not like Mr. Ruskin's severity.

Mr. Palgrave completes his survey of English art by a series of architectural papers, chiefly on Mr. Scott's design for the monument to Prince Albert, in Hyde Park. He is, we think, rather unnecessarily severe on Mr. Scott, although the design in question is, perhaps, among the least successful of the productions of that "fashionable architect." He is led into some very pardonable technical errors, such as his apology for a timber roof over a vaulted nave, on the ground that it keeps the arch from spreading; his assumption that structural deceptions must be admitted into all architecture; and his statement, that the arches of the canopy tombs at Verona are each of a single stone, and have therefore no thrust: the fact being that, in all but the smallest of these famous monuments, the arches are in three or five stones, and the thrust is so great, that Mr. Ruskin, while declaring one of them to be "the most perfect Gothic sepulchral monument in the world," is forced into an elaborately disingenuous apology for the four iron rods which hold the structure together. These errors on Mr. Palgrave's part are more than bal

anced by his account of the way in which competitions for monuments are commonly decided in England, which, had we room, we should be glad to quote, as a contribution to the periodical disputes over soldiers' monuments, with which our American communities are afflicted.

In the closing paper, on "New Paris," Mr. Palgrave has some very discriminating and just remarks on the present rebuilding of the great capital of Europe. This is, probably, the most extensive system of architectural improvement that was ever undertaken, at least in modern times; and the language heretofore used in regard to it, in France and elsewhere, has been, so far as we know, that of indiscriminate and excessive admiration. In the present condition of the popular mind on matters of Art, this is perhaps not a bad sign, inasmuch as the same language is commonly used in reference to any and every building enterprise which is sufficiently conspicuous or costly. But the architecture of the Paris streets is accepted, by the self-styled arbiters of architecture at home and abroad, as the Ultima Thule of excellence and good taste in that direction; as the style which cultivated people have tacitly agreed to consider" as combining all the desirable qualities which street buildings ought to possess; and we are glad, therefore, that even so restrained and moderate a demurrer as this of Mr. Palgrave's has been set against this hasty judgment. The Paris streets are without a rival in modern cities, as all must agree; but they are so, not because their architecture is unexceptionable, but because that of other capitals is beneath contempt. In the Paris streets, a mean house is the exception: in London or New York, mean houses are the rule. We have certainly no wish to undervalue the beauty of Paris; but we must be allowed to say, while paying the willing tribute of our admiration to the magnificence and grandeur of the plan of Louis Napoleon, and to the general good taste with which it is being executed, that the plan itself has afflicted the city with the monotony of style, which is the curse of all systematic improvement; and that, in its execution, the effect has been exaggerated by the same cause to which it owes all its excellence, viz., the rigid training of all French architects in a style which is now fast becoming stereotyped. There is not, perhaps, in all the hundred kilomètres of new boulevards and avenues and streets and squares, a single building which can be compared in vulgar ugliness with the dreadful piles of granite and freestone to which our American eyes are accustomed; but it is equally true, that, in all

the thousand examples of uniform good taste and frequent elegance, there is not a single design which has either grandeur or picturesqueness. There is no variety of style; the same forms of square openings, and pilasters, and festoons of flowers, and caryatids, and medallions, are repeated with ingeniously varied but wearisome iteration over the whole vast and splendid city. What Paris needs is a body of young architects, educated outside the Imperial school, with the power and the will to break through the pleasant trammels of government patronage, and to model the new architecture after the old. Let them go over to the Ile de la Cité, and study what remains of the Paris of the Middle Age; let them follow that up with Rouen and Chartres and Tours and Orleans and Blois and Lyons; and, when they have once got fairly penetrated with the vigor and interest and life of the old French Gothic, as noble an architecture as ever existed, whether for civic or ecclesiastic purposes, they will be competent to build a city, beside which the Paris of the upstart emperor would sink into deserved neglect. And it is just possible that the change might be so far a beneficent one for us over the water, that our ambitious young architects might perhaps be induced to burn, or sell at a fair discount, the voluminous works of M. César Daly, and go to work designing for themselves, instead of taking pride in their adaptations from the latest Paris fashions.

C. A. C.

MISCELLANEOUS.

Mr. ALGER'S "Genius of Solitude: ""* is a book as to which the reader's interest, as well as his judgment, will depend on the mood in which he takes it up. If he happens to be unsympathetic, a trifle gay, inclined ever so little to satire and persiflage, the sentiment of it will be apt to seem overstrained, its style artificial, its view of nature and man quite subjective and unreal. A mocking temper, even an average sense of humor, will hardly do it justice. In fact, it has a merit and charm- along with its wealth of sentiment and suggestion, and its evidences of industrious and faithful study — in a certain naïve unconsciousness that such a temper really exists, a fearless candor of appeal to sentiments and emotions of which we are apt to

* The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, the Loneliness of Human Life. By WILLIAM ROUNSVILLE ALGER. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

take too little account. Its style, both of thought and structure and imagery, seems to have been strongly affected by a kind of literature with which the writer is probably far more familiar than any of his readers or critics, a literature which contains some of the rarest and finest utterances of the human mind, but which is imperfectly acclimatized among us. That literature of memoirs, correspondence, and mystical or reflective poetry, so largely reflected in Mr. Alger's writings, and tempering the accumulations of his patient study with a mellow warmth as rare as their curious abundance, — is rich in a style of sentiment and imagery which is somewhat more familiar to us, and in truth somewhat more to our taste, under the translucent haze of a foreign idiom. We wish, now and then, that we could forget the associations of our English speech, and read some of these thoughtful and suggestive paragraphs in the French or German diction, to which they seem rather native. And it has occurred to us, that the writer, to whom we owe so much for what he has transposed from other tongues to ours, would do well to make himself familiar with the more plebeian uses of those tongues, and especially to cultivate that quick appreciation of humor, so essential in self-criticism, and so important in giving what we may call the stereoscopic effect of the words one uses, and winning a true mastery of style.

Whatever the justness or aptness of these suggestions, there will be many readers of this volume who will feel no such drawback on their satisfaction in the instruction, counsel, inspiration, and comfort they get from it. Even the reader most critically minded, and craving to keep closest to facts tangible and outward, for the sentiments and emotions he slights are after all facts, though of another order, will be attracted and instructed by the personal sketches which make rather more than half the book. Some of them - for example the first, that of Gotama Buddha — are full enough to be biographical sketches, of a curious and independent value. Others, such as those of Pascal, Rousseau, and Comte, are studies of character, or exercises in moral analysis, of much insight and psychological instruction. The closing one, that of Jesus, which with a frank simplicity is presented among the rest in this new aspect, is a real contribution to a study of everlasting interest and typical importance. In general, we should say of these sketches, that their value would be increased by a more scrupulous selection and more uniform fulness and carefulness of treatment; since many of them are mere hints and fragments, increasing the number of names, without adding to the