thereon, would have us accept a deeper similarity, of mind, to the Greek philosopher! A notion nearer the mark, is graphically supplied by his friend Thomson, when he begins his letter with a red wafer stuck on the paper; eyes, nose, mouth, &c., given in black. The symbol so pleased the sculptor, he adopted it himself as an occasional jocose signature.

Chantrey's intellect was a limited but emphatically capable, if not very elevated, one; ready at command and certain. All he said or did was, as far as it went, to the purpose. Altogether practical was the whole man. The sagacity of a sublimated common sense, was his prevailing characteristic. His mind was a perceptive one, not thoughtful or intense; making use of all that came in his way; gleaning information; receiving results, and applying them shrewdly. He attained proficiency in all he undertook, whether it were wood-carving, painting, portrait-busts, fishing, shooting. Without his range, were it but one step, he was helpless. But then, as a rule, he took care never to advance that step. And this was easy to him; for he was averse to all beyond the literal, and the every-day. The singular, the eccentric, in thought, manner of art, way of wearing one's hair, or any other department, he detested. 'Let us stick to the broad, common high-way, and do our best there,' was the instinctive feeling of the man. He was haunted by no unattainable, ever-retreating, fair ideals. No dreaming aspirations, or indefinite yearnings, had part in his life. His somewhat extreme, and in Mr. Jones's hands quite over-done devotion, to simplicity,' was very characteristic; in unison with that really satisfactory in him, but pointing to his wants, his restrictedness of feeling and unimaginativeness.

The same practical tendency and restriction of effort to things within reach, the sagacious, unerringly successful application of himself to the certain and definite, characterise his art: in the artist, ever the blossom and result of the whole man. Emphatic fulfilment does his success afford of the celebrated apophthegm of Mulready; know what you have to do, and do it.' He did not spend himself on false aims, nor once lose himself in a wrong track. Having early ascertained his true field, portraiture, he consistently adhered to it, notwithstanding all'advice of friends;' though far from lacking ambition, or high ideas of the so-called higher branches. In this, his history is especially instructive, worthy of heed. He was faithful to the light that was in him. And in better times of art he might have been a still better artist. For his was not the light to live independently of surrounding conditions, but in accordance with them. He, like Mr. Jones, accepted this present state of art as the normal and legitimate; taking all that is for gospel: the exaggerated importance of painting and sculpture; their divorcement from art-universal; the prevailing copyisms and anomalies. On a particular factor's

chimney in the disguise of an obelisk, executed from a design of his own-the literal copy of an Egyptian original, he especially valued himself. When he or Jones talks of art,' they, like many others, mean only sculpture or painting. When he carved a monumental work, he unhesitatingly adopted the customary æsthetically hideous and barbarous stone-mason's ornaments and bounding lines of the tablet. He grafted his clever art, in the execution of the figures, on the base common-places, the undertaker's morsels of Egyptian symbolism, in vogue; troubling his head about such matters no more than another man. A Gothic cathedral was to his mind, the pre-ordained receptacle for his and other modern sculptors' work, the arena of good or bad lights for monumental tablets and colossal masses of statuary. One small chapel at Westminster is completely filled, that is to say extinguished, by his huge statue of Watt, so as to have called down the very just indignation of Mr. Pugin. We well can fancy how he would have wondered and been silent,' had one told him the pedestal he and his brethren unintelligently manufacture from generation to generation for their busts, is a disgrace to the art, and those practising it; in its unredeemed hideousness, its mechanical but costly multiplication, its utter defiance, forgetfulness, of art and its demands. His commonsense led him to object to Roman cuirasses and bare arms and legs. But the most he could offer in substitution was a mongrel compromise between antique forms and modern reality. This, indeed, was much, considering all things. Of the one great office of all art-the consecration of contemporary reality, the poetic representation of the actual, it was scarce to be expected he should be rightly conscious.

The poet Flaxman, bitten by mania, once made a deliberate proposal, which turns one's very blood cold, in its puerile inartisticalness; a colossal statue of Britannia to be erected on Greenwich-hill between the two wings of the hospital. favourite dream of Chantrey's, fortunately unrealized also, was the perpetuation of his fame inseparable from his native soil itself, by a colossal statue to the Duke of Sutherland, carved on the perpendicular side of a Derbyshire rock; a thing frightful to think of: so monstrous a scar on great Nature's face. This idea was a violation, but still a matter of fact one, of Chantrey's usual common sense leanings. These are characteristically evidenced by his just contempt of allegories.

Such feeling as a gifted common-sense, the talented development of common-sense observation, could attain, that Chantrey manifested. His favourite position for a horse, standing on all four legs, because you cannot give a durable effect to that in its nature transitory,' is an instance of this real power of his.

the sentiment emulated of a horse standing still in a field and

looking about him,' illustrates the kind and amount of imagination whereof he was capable; real as far as it went, but that, not far. In the celebrated Lichfield sleeping children, and remaining works of that small class, it was just this tangible sentiment and prosaic poetry that were achieved. Mr. Jones unconsciously explains the heart of the matter, when saying, with characteristic inspiration, they went to the heart of every mother and delighted every parent.' The reason of their popularity is here suggested. There was just sentiment enough to catch the eye; and not too much. Any other or higher imagination, he had not. The case our biographer endeavours to make out, of the imaginativeness of Chantrey's use of flowers, is simply absurd; in keeping with the rest of the criticisms, wherein it is gravely affirmed, he equalled in his monumental works, the antique, nay, surpassed the majority of classic remains. The telling the death of the head of a family' by a wreath of lilies, the principal one broken away, Mr. Jones would have us believe did as much as any poetic metaphor has ever done.' The fading form for the consumptive,' the drooping for the sorrowful,' &c., are all feats of imagination worthy of a Valentine, or the compiler of a 'Language of Flowers."

6

Chantrey's monuments were deformed by the prevailing vice of modern sculpture; excessive and misdirected imitativeness. His cushions and mattresses, cost him and his workmen as much pains to elaborate, as the human faces themselves: the result meretricious, alien to true art, degrading to the taste of all whose admiration is caught by such tricks. When will modern sculptors learn the elementary fact, that typicalness in representation of all unessential parts, or all wherein imitative delusion is easy, is the very soul of their artistic language, as to such things?

In his monumental sculptures generally, apart from the class just noticed, Chantrey realized as high an excellence as the modern range of such things admits; the technic attainment far exceeding in importance the phonetic; the aesthetic a very mixed, and, as a whole, unsatisfactory one. In his public equestrian monuments, we have real and refined art, and character, of a restricted kind; art only too good-in general, immeasurably, for the heroes celebrated. But in his portraitbusts, we have him on his own peculiar ground; where he put forth indubitable mastery, exceeded by no known works in that province, in rare instances equalled. For the earnestness, dignity, pre-eminence of character and of expression, truth of portraiture, and sober but certain and unerring art, of these productions he demands all honour. From his hands, the outward aspects of a large section of the distinguished and really

great of his time have received justice. Would that, devoted to the recording of such, a portrait sculptor and painter, similar, existed in every generation! Around him flocked a more numerous crowd of the celebrated and important, than it perhaps ever fell to the lot of another artist to attract. Nor was this prosperity without cause. There was reality in the man, and in his art.

ART. III.—Christ's Second Coming; will it be Pre-millennial? By the Rev. David Brown, A.M. Second Edition. Carefully revised and corrected, with large additions. Edinburgh and London: Johnstone and Hunter. 1849.

THERE has long been a complaint that continental doctors of theology, students of physical science, and the masters of our popular literature, have become, if not absolute unbelievers, yet only half-believers, in Christianity; tolerating, rather, its distinctive truths as matters of popular faith, than giving them a bonâ fide reception as the revealed mind of God. There is considerable cause for this lamentation. But the tendency has been too general to represent this scepticism as affecting the very vitals of Christianity, threatening to blot out from our convictions the facts on which the Christian system is built. Such apprehensions betray a lack of trust in the wisdom of Providence, which has ordained that truth is to be elicited, in its purest and most influential form, by the conflict between unbelief and faith; just as the strength of individual character is but half known, till difficulty and opposition call it forth.

There is a species of infidelity to some extent prevalent amongst us, even more to be dreaded than a wholesale rejection of the Bible. We know not how to describe the common principle running through all the divisions of it better than by calling it-a rooted distrust in Christianity as a means of renewing the world; a belief that its practical power has been exhausted, and that till some new revelation has been made, the world's salvation can never be accomplished. There are those who regard it as having been a grand inspiration, while it lasted-an overpowering influence, till it had spent itself: but that now we have subsided again into stagnation and hardness, and require new miracles, new facts, and new truths, to meet the unsatisfied cravings of the soul-as if the progress of humanity had outstripped the resources of Christianity.

One of the developments, and perhaps not the most harmless one, of this spirit has embodied itself in the system of modern Millenarianism. Taking the amount and quality of the proof relied on by the advocates of this system, it seems to us that unless there were a predisposition towards it-arising from a want of faith in Christianity-such confessedly slight evidence would never be sufficient to convince them of such extraordinary doctrines. They admit, indeed, the truth of the facts on which Christianity is founded; and hold, in common with the great body of believers, the doctrines usually deduced from them. But when we speak of the competency of the gospel to regenerate the world, and expatiate on the prospects of spiritual glory to be realized by its agency, we are accused of deluding ourselves and others with rhetoric.' According to them, the gospel has done nearly as much as it ever will do with its present powers: though there is a vast amount of merely nominal Christianity existing-though there are huge masses of idolaters peopling three quarters of the globe-though the majority of the human race know nothing of a Redeemer-we are not to expect any great alteration till Christ shall come to set up in person a visible kingdom in the world; and even then, a great part of his enemies will yield only a feigned obedience. Such a doctrine is so directly opposed, and so immensely inferior, to that which is commonly held on the nature and prospects of the kingdom of Christ that unless it be sustained by strong scriptural assertions, so that in rejecting it we do violence to the text and spirit of the word of God, the holding of such a doctrine must spring, either from the conviction that Christianity in its present resources is unable, or ill-adapted, to do the great work of human redemption, or from a defective perception of those carnal elements belonging to the system which is brought into odious rivalry with it. If the former explanation be adopted, we may reply by appealing to the history of Christianity; or if our opponent have realized the power of the gospel in his own person, we may send him to his own experience-since what has subdued one heart, is able to subdue all hearts, and to captivate and sanctify all wills. If the defective perception' exist to which we have referred, it must originate in a sensuous, imaginative cast of mind, more awake to outward, material grandeur than to that spiritual and inward glory which constitutes the attraction of the gospel. We are unwilling to apply sweeping criticism to every holder of the sentiments in question, but there must be a tendency to this defect in the mental constitution of modern Pre-millenialists.

There are three ways of ascertaining the value of any theory professing to be derived from the Bible, each one of which, in