But it was easy to see that the complacent air of superior strength with which the Queen's Counsel took the management out of his junior's hands, conveyed to the jury (a common jury) the belief that things were now to be managed in quite different and vastly better style. And have you not known such a thing as that a family, not a whit better, wealthier, or more respectable than all the rest in the little country town or the country parish, do yet, by carrying their heads higher (no mortal could say why), gradually elbow themselves into a place of admitted social superiority? Everybody knows

exactly what they are, and from what they have sprung; but somehow, by resolute assumption, by a quiet air of being better than their neighbours, they draw a-head of them, and attain the glorious advantage of one step higher on the delicately graduated social ladder of the district. Now it is manifest that if such people had sense to see their true position, and the absurdity of their pretensions, they would assuredly not have gained that advantage, whatever it may be worth.

But sense and feeling are sometimes burdens in the race of life; that is, they sometimes hold a man back from grasping material advantages which he might have grasped had he not been prevented by the possession of a certain measure of common sense and right feeling. I doubt not, my friend, that you have acquaintances who can do things which you could not do for your life, and who by doing these things, push their way in life. They ask for what they want, and never let a chance go by them. And though they may meet many rebuffs, they sometimes make a successful venture. Impudence sometimes attains to a pitch of sublimity; and at that point it has produced a very great impression upon many men. The incapable person who started for a professorship, has sometimes got it. The man who, amid the derision of the county, published his address to the electors, has occasionally got

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into the House of Commons. vulgar, half-educated preacher, who without any introduction asked a patron for a vacant living in the Church, has now and then got the living. And however unfit you may be for a place, and however discreditable may have been the means by which you got it, once you have actually held it for two or three years, people come to acquiesce in your holding it. They accept the fact that you are there, just as we accept the fact that any other evil exists in this world, without asking why, except on very special occasions. I believe too, that in the matter of worldly preferment, there is too much fatalism in many good men. They have a vague trust that Providence will do more than it has promised. They are ready to think that if it is God's will that they are to gain such a prize, it will be sure to come their way without their pushing. That is a mistake. Suppose you apply the same reasoning to your dinner. Suppose you sit still in your study and say, 'If I am to have dinner to-day, it will come without effort of mine; and if I am not to have dinner to-day, it will not come by any effort of mine; so here I sit still and do nothing." Is not that absurd? Yet that is what many a wise and good man practically says about the place in life which would suit him, and (which would make him happy. Not

Turks and Hindoos alone have a tendency to believe in their Kismet. It is human to believe in that. And we grasp at every event that seems to favour the belief. The other evening, in the twilight, I passed two respectable - looking women, who seemed like domestic servants; and I caught one sentence which one said to the other with great apparent faith. 'You see,' she said, if a thing's to come your way, it'll no gang by ye!'. It was in a crowded street; but if it had been in my country parish where every one knew me, I should certainly have stopped the women, and told them that though what they said was quite true, I feared they were understanding it wrongly;

and that the firm belief we all hold in God's Providence which reaches to all events, and in His sovereignty which orders all things, should be used to help us to be resigned, after we have done our best and failed; but should never be used as an excuse for not doing our best. When we have set our mind on any honest end, let us seek to compass it by every honest means; and if we fail after having used every honest means, then let us fall back on the comfortable belief that things are ordered by the Wisest and Kindest; then is the time for the Fiat Voluntas Tua.

You would not wish, my friend, to be deprived of common sense and of delicate feeling, even though you could be quite sure that once that drag-weight was taken off, you would spring forward to the van, and make such running in the race of life as you never made before. Still, you cannot help looking with a certain interest upon those people who, by the want of these hindering influences, are enabled to do things and say things which you never could. I have sometimes looked with no small curiosity upon the kind of man who will come uninvited, and without warning of his approach, to stay at another man's house: who will stay on, quite comfortable and unmoved, though seeing plainly he is not wanted: who will announce, on arriving, that his visit is to be for three days, and who will then, without farther remark, and without invitation of any kind, remain for a month or six weeks: and all the while sit down to dinner every day with a perfectly easy and unembarrassed manner. You and I, my reader, would rather live on much less than sixpence a-day than do all this. We could not do it. But some people not merely can do it, but can do it without any appearance of effort. Oh, if the people who are victimized by these horseleeches of society could but gain a little of the thickness of skin which characterizes the horseleeches, and bid them be off, and not return again till they are invited! To the same pachydermatous

class belong those individuals who will put all sorts of questions as to the private affairs of other people, but carefully shy off from any similar confidence as to their own affairs also those individuals who borrow small sums of money and never repay them, but go on borrowing till the small sums amount to a good deal. To the same class may be referred the persons who lay themselves out for saying disagreeable things: the candid friends' of Canning: the people who speak their mind,' who form such pests of society. To find fault is to right-feeling men a very painful thing; but some take to the work with avidity and delight. And while people of cultivation shrink, with a delicate intuition, from saying anything which may give pain or cause uneasiness to others, there are others who are ever painfully treading upon the moral corns of all around them. Sometimes this is done designedly: as by Mr. Snarling, who by long practice has attained the power of hinting and insinuating, in the course of a forenoon call, as many unpleasant things as may germinate into a crop of ill-tempers and worries which shall make the house at which he called uncomfortable all that day. Sometimes it is done unawares, as by Mr. Boor, who, through pure ignorance and coarseness, is always bellowing out things which it is disagreeable to some one, or to several, to hear. Which was it, I wonder, Boor or Snarling, who once reached the dignity of the mitre; and who, at prayers in his house, uttered this supplication on behalf of a lady visitor who was kneeling beside him: Bless our friend, Mrs. give her a little more common sense; and teach her to dress a little less like a tragedy queen than she does at present?'

But who shall reckon up the countless circumstances which lie like a depressing burden on the energies of men, and make them work at that disadvantage which we have thought of under the figure of carrying weight in life?

There are men who carry weight in a damp, marshy neighbourhood, who, amid bracing mountain air, might have done things which now they will never do. There are men who carry weight in an uncomfortable house in smoky chimneys: in a study with a dismal look-out : in distance from a railway-station: in ten miles between them and a bookseller's shop. Give another hundred a year of income, and the poor, struggling parson who preaches dull sermons will astonish you by the talent he will exhibit when his mind is freed from the dismal depressing influence of ceaseless scheming to keep the wolf from the door. Let the poor little sick child grow strong and well, and with how much better heart will its father face the work of life! Let the clergyman who preached, in a spiritless enough way, to a handful of uneducated rustics, be placed in a charge where weekly he has to address a large cultivated congregation; and with the new stimulus, latent powers may manifest themselves which no one fancied he possessed, and he may prove quite an eloquent and attractive preacher. A dull, quiet man, whom you esteemed as a blockhead, may suddenly be valued very differently when circumstances unexpectedly call out the solid qualities he possesses, unsuspected before. A man, devoid of brilliancy, may on occasion show that he possesses great good sense; or that he has the power of sticking to his task, in spite of discouragement. Let a man be placed where dogged perseverance will stand him in stead, and you may see what he can do when he has but a chance. The especial weight which has held some men back-the thing which kept them from doing great things and attaining great fame-has been just this: that they were not able to say or to write what they have thought and felt. And indeed a great poet is nothing more than the one man in a million who has the gift to express that which has

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been in the mind and heart of multitudes. If even the most commonplace of human beings could write all the poetry he has felt, he would produce something that would go straight to the hearts of many.

It is touching to witness the indications and vestiges of sweet and admirable things which have been subjected to a weight which has entirely crushed them down: things which would have come out into beauty and excellence if they had been allowed a chance. You may witness one of the saddest of all the losses of nature in various old maids. What kind hearts are there running to waste! What pure and gentle affections blossom to be blighted! I dare say you have heard a young lady of more than forty sing; and you have seen her eyes fill with tears at the pathos of a very commonplace verse. Have you not thought that there was the indication of a tender heart which might have made some good man happy; and, in doing so, made herself happy too? But it was not to be. Still, it is sad to think that sometimes upon cats and dogs there should be wasted the affection of a kindly human being! And you know, too, how often the fairest promise of human excellence is never suffered to come to fruit. You must look upon gravestones to find the names of those who promised to be the best and noblest specimens of the race. They died in early youth; perhaps in early childhood. childhood. Their pleasant faces, their singular words and ways, remain, not often talked of, in the memories of subdued parents, or of brothers and sisters now grown old, but never forgetting how that one of the family that was as the flower of the flock was the first to fade. It has been a proverbial saying, you know, even from heathen ages, that those whom the gods love die young. It is but an inferior order of human beings that makes the living succession to carry on the human race.

A. K. H. B.

1861.]

a certain fact that they do not work out that capacity with equal strenuousness or an equal result. Mrs. Wells, whom we have just named above, was the only woman we know in England who showed a really striking faculty,-greater even, in our judgment, than that of Rosa Bonheur, though not used on so bold a scale. The Algerian views exhibited this year by Mrs. Bodichon, as well as her previous productions, also evidence great ability, a sense of what is large and impressive in nature, and some corresponding power of realization in art. They beat the majority of male landscape-designers on this ground, and hold their own creditably in all respects. What other ladies lack is training and the strong will to be trained, pictorial invention, and the point of view which might lead to its attainment. The idea and practice of female art is indeed as yet only in its infancy, and one should not be too hard upon shortcomings; still, one may demand to see female studentship on nearly the same level as male studentship, and to tell the truth, it is not yet found to be there.

Of the two Water-Colour Societies, the elder was in strength this year, the younger extremely poor; and there is reason to fear that, whatever particular years may produce, the tendency is towards decline, not towards advance, nor even stability. England still stands at the head of water-colour art, but the school is no longer so distinctively a school as it used to be, nor is it so strong individually. Turner, the perfect and unapproached master, is gone these ten years; Cox, the creative eye and hand, full of fetterless mastery and solemn truth, is gone too; Lewis, the consummate designer and painter, has seceded to oil; William Hunt, the witching and quite inimitable transcriber and colorist, still lives and paints his very best, but he is an old man. When he departs-may the day be distant— whom have we to succeed him of the same calibre as himself, and the other three masters we have named? Literally no one.

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The high places of water-colour art, pursued as a separate profession, will be tenantless, the tradition of supreme excellence interrupted. The school, as a school, will have its chief to seek, for anything that appears at present. It is true, however, that some of our best painters are also eminent in water-colour, though they do not rely upon it as their especial department; and among those who do so, very great merit is claimable by Alfred Fripp, Haag, Newton, and Smallfield, who all exhibited this year, and F. S. Burton. Mr. Haag has made wonderful strides beyond the hard and limited manner of his works of a few years ago. Mr. Newton is peculiarly able and powerful in mountain and other landscape; and Mr. Smallfield, in figure-studies and object painting, comes nearer to Hunt than anybody else does. Some of the leading men, such as Haag and Newton, paint with a vigour and depth which bring water-colour into competition with oil. This is a point of success in a certain sense; but it is not the point for water-colour to aim at, and, growing as it does year by year, will rather neutralize than promote the water-colour school as such. With young men like Newton, Smallfield, and Burton, and with the elder men we have specified, along with some others, there will be a considerable amount of talent engaged upon this branch of art for years to come; but it will not be either so great in itself, or so true and healthy in aspect for the special purposes of the art, as in the time of Cox and Lewis.

The most novel and significant exhibition of the year has been that of Mr. Scott's pictures-eight oil-paintings of large but not extraordinary size, illustrative of the history of the English Border, and painted for the hall of Wallington, the Northumbrian seat of Sir Walter C. Trevelyan. In this their permanent home, they appear in connexion with other painted and decorative work, and an important sculptural group by Mr. Woolner is to form the central feature; the