Grisi in this her peculiar role; one which, did we believe in Pythagorus, we might believe she must have filled some three hundred years ago, and only now be reviving former passages in her career for the benefit of the nineteenth century.

Boucardé is a fat and stupid Gennaro, the real and veritable "Pescator ignobile," and not the high-bred, unmistakable patrician Mario appears even in his dingy dress. There is not a grain of romance about Boucardé, and his voice is no more comparable to Mario's silvery tones than his appearance. The fact is, he drinks like a fish, and is rapidly ruining a naturally fine organ. He made a good point in giving the words "Era mia madre—ah! misera," with an expression of deep pathos that brought down rounds of applause, and a particular kind of roar peculiar to a gratified Italian crowd, very savage and bloodthirsty to the ears, reminding one of revolutions and all kinds of horrors. Coletti, as the Duke, produced but little effect; nor was his acting within a thousand ages of dear old Tamburini, whose dignified carriage and princely air make all the more striking the satanic leer with which he witnesses his consort's despair in the grand duet in the second act, where she vainly pleads for the life of her son.

The contralto was below criticism. Ferraris, in a new ballet called "Illiria," was perfectly celestial, and appears to me wonderfully improved. She looked exquisitely young and pretty, and quite inflamed the susceptible Italians, who roared and screamed, bellowed with rapture, until I expected to see the French soldiers calling them to order. She advances, doing the prettiest things imaginable with a tambourine, all garlanded with knots of ribbon, which, holding before her, she seems to run after in the most graceful manner. I wish I could remember half her charming originalities; they were piquant enough to rouse dulness equal to that of the seven sleepers, and Heaven knows the Italians are not unsympathetic when beauty appears. One dance she executed between two lovers, the Loved and the Detested, and it was so contrived that her face and step were all that was inviting-seductive and smiling to the one, when, turning short round, her whole expression and attitude changed as if by magic into an air of deep disdainful fierceness and hate, and this done so rapidly and so often that it scarcely seemed possible to be the same person. I thought the rotten old theatre would have tumbled about our ears, so loud and enthusiastic was the stamping and applause. As to her tour de force and her mimica, especially in one scene, when to the beautiful serenade air in "Don Pasquale," exquisitely played on the flute, she expresses her love in a series of the most seductive and graceful attitudes that ever entered into the heart of a naughty little daughter of Eve to conceive, I really want words sufficiently to extol; it was perfect-the very poetry of dancing, and worthy of the Muse herself. Venus alone could have inspired the pretty rogue to do such wonders, and who knows if she had not been bearing offerings and performing sacrifices in her ruined temple hard by, near the Forum? and that the goddess had not heard and granted her prayers spite of the lapse of centuries, and the ruin of her shrines, and of the Pope, and the college of cardinals, and those abominable French soldiers, always prowling where they have no business?

t

RUSKIN'S EDINBURGH LECTURES.*

ON the morning of the day of Mr. Ruskin's first Lecture, there might be seen, pacing from end to end of Queen-street, Edinburgh, a grave Southron, evidently intent on some searching scrutiny of the goodly buildings in that fair long street. The Southron was unmistakably a' chield amang them takin' notes, and perhaps to prent 'em. His eye was fixed on the first-floor windows, and not to be distracted from its intentness of gaze till the last house in the series was reached and examined. What could be his mission? Evidently he was a man of business, and one who knew how to go about it in a business-like way, steadily devoting his energies for the time being to the work before him, whatever that might be. A sonsie face might meet his eye at this or that window in the protracted course of his survey, but not to make him swerve from his purpose, or falter in his allegiance. Well might the piqued owner of the sonsie face marvel at the man and his mission, and become extra piqued to discover who the one and what the other could be.

If she went that day-as, being young, civilised, and inquisitive, she was sure to do-to Mr. Ruskin's first Lecture on Architecture and Painting, delivered at the Philosophical Institution in that very street, her curiosity would be speedily set at rest. Enter the Oxford Graduate, and lo! the mysterious inquisitor of the morning. So the first part of the problem is solved. But what could he be "glowering" at, in that strange, stern fashion, this morning? Hardly has he begun his lecture ere this remainder of the problem is solved too.

Speaking of the kind of window all but universal in the New Townviz., a massy lintel of a single stone, laid across from side to side, with bold square-cut jambs-in fact, the simplest form it is possible to build— Mr. Ruskin allows to it the merit of being "manly and vigorous," and even dignified in its utter refusal of ornament, but "cannot say it is entertaining." He then continues: "How many windows precisely of this form do you suppose there are in the New Town of Edinburgh ?"

Here the shrewd damosel catches an inkling of the meaning of that morning scrutiny. Of course, he was counting the windows! And by his last abrupt sentence it would seem that on this numerical errand he has perambulated the whole New Town-has been toiling at "dot and carry one" all the way from St. Bernard's-crescent to Leith-walk-has left no lintel untold in Charlotte-square or Moray-place, in Heriot-row or Royal-circus, in Doune-terrace or Bellevue-crescent, in the intricacies of Stockbridge and the barony of Broughton. But he qualifies, and she finds she has been too hasty in her inferences.

For he goes on to say: "I have not counted them all through the town, but I counted them this morning through this very Queen-street, in which your hall is; and on the one side of that street, there are of these windows, absolutely similar to this example, and altogether devoid of any relief by decoration, six hundred and seventy-eight." The computation includes-with severe conscientiousness it is added-York-place

* Lectures on Architecture and Painting, delivered at Edinburgh in November, 1853. By John Ruskin. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1854.

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and Picardy-place (which are but a continuation of Queen-street), but takes no account of any window which has mouldings. The items are all "ditto ditto" of that not very entertaining single-stone lintel, and the total is six hundred and seventy-eight.

It has commonly been thought that we were paying Edinburgh a high compliment when speaking of her as the MODERN ATHENS. The only doubt was, whether the compliment was not misplaced and extravagant. But, by Mr. Ruskin's philosophy, so far as architecture is concerned, it is no honour, but the reverse, to be thus Hellenised. Greek he cannot away with. The Modern Athens invites him to come and lecture to the Modern Athenians. He goes; accurately counts six hundred and seventy-eight windows of Greek type in one of her streets; and tells her she ought to be ashamed of herself.

Before thus abusing her pride of place, however, he adroitly seeks a favourable hearing by a few flattering words on the lustre of the Firth of Forth, the rugged outline of the Castle Rock, and the historical charm of the Canongate. Nay, even of the New Town he declares, that so far as he is acquainted with modern architecture, he is aware of no streets which, in simplicity and manliness of style, or general breadth and brightness of effect, equal those of this division of the Scottish capital. But he soon turns to criticism of another sort, and produces his "little account" of 678 ut suprà. "And your decorations," he adds, "are just as monotonous as your simplicities. How many Corinthian and Doric columns do you think there are in your banks, and post-offices, institutions, and I know not what else, exactly like one another?" And then he proceeds to enforce the claims of Gothic, with a fervour and an exclusiveness that, to prejudiced Modern Athenians, must have made him seem a Goth with a vengeance.

In his Gothic proselytism he lays stress, with his wonted ingenuity and eloquence, on Nature's suggestion and sanction of the Gothic type. He bids us gather a branch from tree or flower, and mark how every one of its leaves is terminated, more or less, in the form of the pointed arch, and to that form owes its grace and character. And he argues from what we see in the woods and fields around us, that as they are evidently meant for our delight, and as we always feel them to be beautiful, we may assume that the forms into which their leaves are cast are indeed types of beauty, not of extreme or perfect, but average beauty. "And finding that they invariably terminate more or less in pointed arches, and are not square-headed, I assert the pointed arch to be one of the forms most fitted for perpetual contemplation by the human mind; that it is one of those which never weary, however often repeated; and that therefore, being both the strongest in structure, and a beautiful form (while the square head is both weak in structure, and an ugly form), we are unwise ever to build in any other." Whatever be the worth of this argument from the forms of Nature, it is at the least a one-sided induction-drawn from one department of Nature only. It is a little curious, for instance, to find the lecturer, further on, denouncing the supposition that when Sir Walter Scott wrote about

Each purple peak, each flinty spire

of the Trosachs, he was describing what existed in fact. Hear the

interpreter of the Gothic in nature. "There is not a single spire or pinnacle from one end of the Trosachs to the other. All their rocks are heavily rounded, and the introduction of the word 'spire' is a piece of inaccuracy in description, ventured merely for the sake of the Gothic image." The italics are Mr. Ruskin's own, but they serve our turn too.

He counsels the New Town to set about de-Hellenising itself with all convenient speed. The denizens of Drummond-place and Randolphcrescent and the "lave," may indeed fear, and, as he tells them, must expect at first that there will be difficulties and inconsistencies in carrying out the new, the Gothic, style; but these will soon be conquered, he assures them, if too much is not attempted at once. "Do not be afraid of incongruities," he says,-" do not think of unities of effect" [almost the only thing Edinburgh architects have thought of, and about the last they will be willing to surrender to the Goth]. "Introduce your Gothic line by line and stone by stone; never mind mixing it with your present architecture; your existing houses will be none the worse for having little bits of better work fitted to them; build a porch, or point a window, if you can do nothing else; and remember that it is the glory of Gothic architecture that it can do anything. . . . . Only be steadily determined that, even if you cannot get the best Gothic, at least you will have no Greek; and in a few years' time,-in less time than you could learn a new science or a new language thoroughly,—the whole art of your native country will be reanimated." With much that the lecturer contends for, in his general defence of Gothic and defiance of Greek, we heartily concur -and incidentally we may express our thanks for his just strictures on the bad building of the day, in the parts concealed by paint and plaster, and "the strange devices that are used to support the long horizontal cross beams of our larger apartments and shops, and the framework of unseen walls." We own to some fellow-feeling in his opinion of the vastly-lauded St. George's Church-or, as he irritatingly describes it, to men and women born and bred in sight of and reverence for it, your most costly and most ugly buildings, the great church with the dome, at the end of George-street. I think I never saw a building with a principal entrance so utterly ghastly and oppressive; and it is as weak as it is ghastly. The huge horizontal lintel above the door is already split right through." His satire is legitimately directed, too, against the leonine ornamentation of the Royal Institution, carefully finished off at the very top of the building, "just under its gutter," where such "most delicate and minute pieces of sculpture" have the finest prospect of being out of sight, out of mind. "You cannot see them in a dark day, and perhaps may never, to this hour, have noticed them at all. But there they are: sixty-six finished heads of lions, all exactly the same; and therefore, I suppose, executed on some noble Greek type, too noble to allow any modest Modern to think of improving upon it." And here the lecturer amused his auditors by a diagram, the work of Mr. Millais, representing in most piquant contrast one of these impossible heads of noble Greek type, and the actual head of a tiger in the Gardens at Broughton, no lion being available in that collection. A copy of the drawing forms the frontispiece, and a very taking one, of this volume of lectures, to enable all to compare a piece of true, faithful, and natural work with "the Grecian sublimity of the ideal beast," as perpetuated by the traditions of the Renaissance.

one of

But when Mr. Ruskin begins to rhapsodise about the religious superiority of medieval day-labourers, and the souls killed by and buried under "your Greek stones," we follow at a very humble distance, with wandering steps and slow. This slaughter of the innocents, many will think, out-Herods Herod. "These square stones," the lecturer solemnly affirms, as he dilates on the "tyranny" of Greek architecture, "are not prisons of the body, but graves of the soul; for the very men who could do sculpture like this of Lyons* for you are here! still here, in your despised workmen: the race has not degenerated; it is you who have bound them down, and buried them beneath your Greek stones. There would be a resurrection of them, as of renewed souls, if you would only lift the weight of these weary walls from off their hearts." There is wholesome truth, and truth much needed if not much in request, at the bottom of this doctrine; but why word it in such questionable phrase? People who might otherwise mark, learn, and inwardly digest, now only read; and those who might turn down the page to think, now turn over the page with a smile, or perchance toss aside the book with a sneer.

Having discussed Architecture in his two opening lectures, in the third Mr. Ruskin comments on Turner and his Works. He bates not a jot of his hero-worship as time goes on. Turner is still to him all that ever he was, and perhaps more. "I did not come here," says Mr. Ruskin to his Edinburgh listeners,-"I did not come here to tell you of my belief or my conjectures; I came to tell you the truth which I have given fifteen years of my life to ascertain, that this man, this Turner, of whom you have known so little while he was living among you, will one day take his place beside Shakspeare and Verulam, in the annals of the light of England.

"Yes," he iterates: "beside Shakspeare and Verulam, a third star in that central constellation, round which, in the astronomy of intellect, all other stars make their circuit. By Shakspeare, humanity was unsealed to you; by Verulam, the principles of nature; and by Turner, her aspect. All these were sent to unlock one of the gates of light, and to unlock it for the first time. But of all the three, though not the greatest, Turner was the most unprecedented in his work. Bacon did what Aristotle had attempted; Shakspeare did perfectly what Eschylus did partially; but none before Turner had lifted the veil from the face of nature; the majesty of the hills and forests had received no interpretation, and the clouds passed unrecorded from the face of the heaven which they adorned, and of the earth to which they ministered."

All this is far above our capacity. Turner we admire most warmly, in our purblind way; but this new leash of Representative Men it puzzles us to comprehend. It is consolatory, certainly, to find the admission that Turner was not the greatest of the three-although the sequel goes to cancel that admission. We can fancy the stare of people of old-fashioned notions and unread hitherto in John Ruskin, at meeting with this passage about Shakspeare and Bacon having forerunners, but Turner none, If

* Referring to the elaborate façade of the cathedral of Lyons, illustrated by a drawing of an angle of one of the pedestals, a "minute fragment," no larger “than a schoolboy could strike off in wantonness with a stick," but exquisitely filled up with graceful and thoughtful composition.