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again, "another naturally great man, with as true an eye for nature as Raphael, he stumbles over the blocks of the antique statues-wanders in the dark valley of their ruins to the end of his days. He has left you a few outlines of muscular men straddling and frowning behind round shields. Much good may they do you! Another lost mind!" In the highway of his argument, the critic will have a larger following than in the "mazy error" of its byways.

The main Pre-Raphaelite principle he defines to be that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that is done, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only; or where imagination is necessarily trusted to, by always endeavouring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened, rather than as it most prettily might have happened. He discriminates, of course, between the Brethren in their habits of adhesion to this principle, not all being equally severe in carrying it out. He allows that so long as they paint only from nature, however carefully selected and grouped, their pictures can never have the characters of the highest class of composition; but then he thinks any advance, from their present style into that of the great schools of composition, whether possible or not, is at this period certainly not desirable. He agrees that they are, as a body, characterised by a total insensibility to the ordinary and popular forms of artistic gracefulness, which occasionally renders their work comparatively unpleasing; and looks forward to the eclecticism of the future to remedy this defect. But on the whole he maintains, that "with all their faults, their pictures are, since Turner's death, the best-incomparably the best -on the walls of the Royal Academy;" and that "such works as Mr. Hunt's Claudio and Isabella have never been rivalled, in some respects never approached, at any other period of art."

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If we have not given specimens of the wise, and truthful, and eloquent passages which enrich this little volume, it is not from indifference or want of sympathy. It is a book so sure to be, sooner or later, in everybody's hands-a book that the frivolous must read in order to be au courant with the mere talk of the day, and that the thoughtful will ponder with very different motives and results-that a more detailed notice of it, in this place, and at this not very early period, were superfluous. Whether Mr. Ruskin judged well in aiding and abetting the current craze for public lectures, admits of a doubt: not so the ease and taste with which he adapted his method and style to the occasion. mistrust of the lecturing mania is, we know, quite unfashionable, laughable, priggish, "and all that ;" but we own to a crotchety share in Elia's general "detestation" of lectures "as superficial and vapid substitutes for quiet reading :" yet Elia could go to hear Hazlitt and even Thelwall; and as our only acquaintance with this Ruskin course has been in the shape of "quiet reading," we have no present right to complain. Besides, the lecture-room is perhaps indispensable now-a-days to the man who would agitate, agitate, agitate-though at the risk of more haste, less speed; and Mr. Ruskin is an Agitator, of no vulgar but of a very decided type.

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WHICH of the three wore the deepest tint, the darkest blue-the skies, the hills, or the lake? Each was of a different shade, but all were blue and beautiful, and all possessed the aspect of complete repose. Standing in that little garden near to the Hotel des Bergues, Rousseau's Island, as it is called, and which you, who have sojourned in Geneva, remember well, were two ladies, looking over the lake. No moving object broke the stillness of the prospect they were gazing on, save one, and that was a solitary boat at some distance, bearing away towards the right. It was scarcely a day suited to a row on Geneva's lake, for no breath of air arose to counteract the vivid heat of the August sun: hot and shadeless he poured forth his overpowering blaze: and, lovely as the lake is, favoured by nature and renowned in poetry, it was more lovely that day to look at than to glide upon.

So thought the gentleman in that solitary boat, Mr. David Dundykeor, as he had of late aspired to be designated, David Dundyke, Esquire. He felt, to use his own expression, which he audibly gave utterance to, "piping hot;" he sat on one side of the boat, and the sun burnt his back; he changed to the other, and it blistered his face; he tried the stern, and the sun seemed to be all round him. He looked up at the Jura, with a vain longing that they might be transported from their site to where they could screen him from his hot tormentor: he turned and gazed at the Alps, and wished he could see on them a shady place, and that he was in it: but, wherever he looked and turned, the sun seemed to blind and to scorch him. Some people, clayey mortals though the best of us are, might have found poetry, or food for it, in all around them but Mr. David Dundyke had no poetry in his heart, still less in his head. He glanced, with listless, half-shut eyes, at the two men who were rowing him along, and began to wonder how any men could be induced to row that burning day, even to obtain a portion of the world's idol, money. David Dundyke cared not, not he, for the scenery around: he never cared for anything in his life that was not substantial and tangible. What was the common scenery of nature to him, since it could not add to his wealth or enhance his importance?—and that was all the matter at his heart. He had never looked at it all the way from London to Geneva: he did not look at that around him now. Geneva itself, its lovely surrounding villas, its picturesque lake, the glorious chain of mountains on either side, even Mont Blanc in the distance, were as nothing to him, and if the earth had opened and swallowed them all up, it would have been no source of regret to him. Then why have travelled so far to see them? asks the unconscious reader. His only object had been to increase his already inflated importance in that great commercial city, the British metropolis, which was his world-he wanted to boast that he had "travelled in France and Swisserland and seen Mount Blank." For some days after his arrival at Geneva, the mountain had remained obstinately enshrouded in clouds, but one evening that Mr. Dundyke and his wife were walking outside the town with some acquaintances

they had made at Geneva, it was pointed out to him, standing proudly forth in all its beauty, and he had stared at it with just as much interest as he would have done at the hill in Greenwich Park covered with snow. He had seen the lovely colour, the dark, brilliant blue of the Rhone's waters, as they escaped from the lake to mingle with those of the thick, turbulent Arve, and he did not care to notice the contrast in the streams: there were no associations in his mind connected with that fair azure lake, whence coursed the one; he had no curiosity as to the never-changing glaciers that were the source of the other. But, by way of going on intelligibly, it may be better to introduce more particularly Mr. David Dundyke.

David Dundyke then, nearly as long ago as he could remember, had gone out in life as errand-boy in a London wholesale tea warehouse; and, steady, taciturn, pushing, and persevering, he rose, step by step, to be its first clerk. There he stopped for a time, but ambition was inherent in him, and it could not be repressed. With later years, higher honours dawned upon him: he was made the fourth partner in the house, and (hold your breath with proper deference while you read it, as he did) was elected a member of the METROPOLITAN BODY CORPORATE! But not yet was he content. His ambition-the ambition that fevered his veins and coloured his dreams-urged him to hope, with time, to attain to the highest dignity of the civic body. The massive gold chain of the Lord Mayor had dazzled his eyes and his brain-to wear that gold chain and sit in the Mansion House, dispensing justice, seemed to him as if it must be a heaven upon earth. He thought he was going on to attain this end; slowly, it is true, but not less sure. He was a hard, griping man, without sympathy for friends or pity for enemies: any poor lame dog, human or animal, that wanted a helping hand over a stile, need never apply to Mr. David Dundyke. He had no children, and by dint of penurious saving, he had accumulated a deal of money: not that he cared so much for money in the abstract, but it was one of the chief aids by which he hoped to rise into importance. He had many a time taken home a redherring, and made his dinner on it, giving his wife the head and the tail to pick for hers. A meek little woman was Mrs. Dundyke, and felt duly thankful for the head and the tail.

This tea-dealing establishment stood high among its fellows, in Fenchurch-street, and was second in respectability to none. Not one of your advertising, poetry-puffing, here-to-day and gone-to-morrow houses, but a genuine, sound firm, having real dealings with Chaney, as the white-haired head of the house was too apt to designate the Celestial Empire. Mr. Dundyke sometimes presumed to correct the "Chaney," and mildly suggest to his respected master and associate that nobody called it, now, anything but "Chinar.”

Of course when he was made the fourth and last partner in this good old house, and, following closely upon that, was elected a commoncouncilman, the herring dinners were at an end. For it would not do for a man of his rising greatness, who had just taken a villa at Brighton and hired two maid-servants, to betray his former penuriousness. All his care, now, was to blazon forth his importance. He began to dress better: his black clothes wore a newer and more glossy appearance, he frequently appeared in white neckcloths, his modest silver chain was

exchanged for a gold one, he looked anxiously out for correspondents to address him as "Esquire," and, greatest step of all, he assumed a ring. The second and third partners in the house, one the son of the old head of the firm, the other moving in good society, both wore a signet-ring, so why should not Mr. Dundyke? His reverence for these rings was great. He would stealthily watch them drawn from the fingers to seal letters (private ones), and watch them slipped on again, with a sigh of admiration. Accordingly, he took heart and bought one, with a crest. Such a crest! Some nondescript animal like those that puzzle you in a child's "Noah's Ark." It looked something between a cat and a cow: with the fore-paw or hoof, as you liked to take it, raised in air. How intensely proud of this ring and crest Mr. Dundyke was, never can be told. He hoped soon to acquire sufficient moral courage to sport it in the ware. house for he had not yet got as far as that. Not that he could have told what the animal was, had it been to save his life he said once, in an off-hand manner, on being closely questioned, that it was the "crest of his family." Poor man! he did not know who or what his family had been, beyond the fact that his father had lived and died an industrious milkman, whose "walk" had been in Shoreditch.

Just about the time that this new ring appeared, something put it into Mr. Dundyke's head that if he went a "tour" it would be another stepping-stone to his greatness. His wife never knew what first gave rise to the thought, and thousands of times has she asked herself since : but, from whatever source it may have arisen, it finally fixed itself in his mind. Long he balanced the advantages and the drawbacks to the scheme: the advantages in one scale, the expense in the other, and the former eventually weighed down the latter. It would cost some of his cherished money, but it would exalt him much in the eyes of his civic brethren, many of whom had never been out of the city in their lives: especially if he could get some newspaper, less indignant at the word "bribe" than is the Times, to announce the departure of "David Dundyke, Esquire, and lady, on a continental tour." One evening, upon returning home from the city, he informed his wife that his mind was made up to go; all that remained was to fix the destination. "Somewhere foreign," he said.

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Foreign!" echoed Mrs. Dundyke. We are writing, take notice, of ten or twelve years ago, when continental travelling, though very general, was not so universal as it is at present. Mrs. Dundyke was a simple, unpretending woman, who with all her new greatness had not acquired an idea beyond her drawing-room dusting and stocking-darning, and the word "foreign" suggested to her mind extremely remote parts of the globe-the two poles, and Cape Horn. "Foreign!"

"One can't travel anywhere that's not foreign," returned Mr. Dundyke, testily, "unless one were to humdrum up and down England in a stage coach."

The lady left the room, and returned to it with an old atlas that had been of service to herself, more imaginary than real, in her school days. She opened it at the map of the world, and sat studying it.

"They are all such great places, so far off in this map!" she exclaimed, in bewilderment. "Africa-Asia-New Zealand-Botany Bay! Stay, there's America! New York; would that do?"

"It's never of no use talking with you about anything, Mrs. D.,” broke out the common-councilman, wrathfully. “You can't understand things."

"Then America will not do ?" was the meek answer.

"Do! Did you ever hear of people going to America, except on business? Nobody would believe that I went for anything but to trade. And that's not the end I have in view, Mrs. D."

"China's too far off?" returned the lady, deprecatingly, who entertained the most exalted opinion of the mysterious place; probably because the teas by which her husband's money had been made, came from it.

"Chinar!" roared the exasperated man, "the woman might as well suggest the sun! I have a great mind, ma'am, not to let you go with me, for your stupidity. You had better buy a baby's catechism of geography."

The lady sighed, closed the atlas, and pushed it gently from her. She thought she would make one more attempt.

"Paris, dear husband? That would be within reach.”

"It won't do, ma'am. It's as common as Margate, and ten times commoner. Everybody, with a ten-pound note and a week to spare, rushes over to Paris now-spending their week in lumbering up in them great diligences, and lumbering down again. A journey to Paris is thought nothing of: and I want my tour, Mrs. D., to be one that will make a noise in the world."

"Yes," said the lady, humbly. "I fear I cannot think of any other place."

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Very likely not, ma'am: it's well you have got a husband to think for you. What do you say to GENEVA?" and the common-councilman threw back his head, and brought out the word with undisguised triumph.

“Geneva!” cried the poor woman, aghast. "Where's that? Over in Greece, or Turkey, is it not ?"

"It is in Swisserland, Mrs. D."

"Geneva !" she still repeated, in consternation, "what have I heard of Geneva ?-Some very grand place, very far, and very dear—that none but the tip-top quality go

to!"

"Just so, ma'am: the very thing I'm aiming at. I want to be one of them tip-tops, Mrs. D. And I have bought a guide-book to it, and I mean to go."

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"But the money it will cost," suggested the prudent wife, "have you thought of that ?”

"Yes, ma'am, I have," growled the common-councilman, who made a practice of keeping his wife under, "and I have made up my mind to stand it without wincing."

"And how shall we manage to talk Swiss ?"

"There is no Swiss," snapped Mr. Dundyke. "The language is French: the guide-book says so."

"It will be the same to us," she ventured to say, mildly. speak French."

"We can't

"I know that 'we' means 'yes,' and 'no' means 'no,'" concluded Mr. Dundyke. "We shall rub on well enough with that." Accordingly, one dull, squally morning, early in July, the couple

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