vidual. It should be mentioned, because of its relation to our mode of education, that there is a natural order both in the succession in which the will obtains the supremacy over the other powers, and also in the means by which that will is developed and strengthened. We see it in the infant naturally well endowed, and especially in the idiot, because of the more gradual progress in the control it first acquires over the muscular system, then over the intellect, and finally over the desires, the appetites, and the passions. That natural order in the means by which the will is developed is learned by a similar observation, and the knowledge of it has its practical value in our course of instruction. It is first excited by the instincts, then by the appetite; still again by the desires, the intellect, and finally the moral powers. Thus a child is sometimes seen who, with no lack of muscular power, is unwilling to take anything in his hand. The fear of falling, one development of the instinct of self-preservation, will, however, lead him to grasp with firmness the rounds of a ladder rather than suffer injury. Then he will hold food in his hand, or a cup of water, to gratify his appetite. Next he is induced to hold an object in his hand, to gratify his senses or his curiosity with reference to it. And so he goes from one step to another, the discipline acquired in accomplishing the lower enabling him to achieve the higher. Physical training will, then, form the basis of all well-directed efforts for the education of idiots; first, because of its direct effect to obviate the existing peculiarity of physical condition; and secondly, because the gymnastic exercises constituting the physical training may be designed and adapted to develope the power of attention in conformity with the natural order

of succession.'

These are in truth the ideas which have been made to operate on the idiot with so much practical benefit both in Europe and in America, and if well reflected upon they will be found not merely to form the basis of the education of the imbecile, but, as has been hinted before, of those gifted with ordinary powers. All teachers may learn from the methods with idiots at Earlswood and elsewhere that no lesson, no pursuit ought, when once attention to it has been obtained, to be made fatiguing, and that a prudent change from one object to another, at due intervals, is absolutely essential. A genius may be stunted by over-work and mental fatigue, in the same way as the little germ of thought which lies buried in a deficient organism may be apparently extinguished; but both may be brought out by proper means. The difference between the teachers of the two is, that the one must reach to the height of the mental powers and bodily capabilities, while the other must be able to probe to the lowest depth of the concealed and feeble faculties. We agree with Mr. Sidney that

'the advancements made in the teaching of idiots will not be

without great practical use in teaching others, and bringing to the mind many things of importance that have been overlooked. It will especially throw light on bodily training, as a valuable agent in assisting the mental and moral powers, though it has frequently been regarded merely as promotive of muscular strength and manual dexterity. Corporeal exercises in children need not be only idle amusements and useless pastimes-they may be made of more service, both for the intellect and the organism, than ill-considered tasks and injudicious lessons.'

The eminent medical gentlemen both in America, Great Britain, and other parts of Europe, who have assisted in the amelioration of the condition of the imbecile, ought to be regarded as amongst the truest benefactors of the pitiable objects afflicted by this dreadful calamity. In England, the asylum at Earlswood is worthy of the benevolence of a great nation, and we trust it has become a model and a stimulus in the right direction to the entire civilised world; for where is the community that has not been troubled with the disfiguring presence of idiotcy, often studiously concealed and disregarded, but till these days of highly developed Christian philanthropy and science, never attempted to be solaced or improved by the skilled and benevolent hand of enlightened charity?

ART. III.—A New History of Painting in Italy, from the Second to the Sixteenth Century. By J. A. CROWE and G. B. CAVALCASELLE, Authors of The Early Flemish 'Painters.' 8vo. 2 vols. London: 1864.

WH

HEN Southey was presented by the publishers with a copy of Dr. Aikin's Select Works of the British Poets, from Ben Jonson to Beattie,' he observed that if he had been the compiler of that book, he should have ended just where Dr. Aikin began. If any literary man, in the time of Sir Joshua Reynolds, had composed two thick octavo volumes, containing more than twelve hundred pages, on the history of Italian painting, he would probably have begun exactly where Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have ended. They have not yet entered on the ground which alone he would have thought it worth while to traverse, and they have devoted all this labour and research to a period which would have appeared to him utterly dark and worthless. So it is, however; and we are happy to welcome two volumes containing so much accurate research and so much just criticism on those painters who lived before the close of the fifteenth century.

If we desire to know what was the taste of England in matters of painting a little more than a hundred years ago, let us turn to Horace Walpole's preface to his Edes Walpolianæ,' or Catalogue of the Houghton Collection.* He tells us that

painting

'revived again in the person of Cimabue, who was born in 1240. Some of his works are remaining at Florence; and at Rome, and in other cities, are to be seen the performances of his immediate successors: but as their works are only curious for their antiquity, not for their excellence, and as they are not to be met with in collections, I shall pass over those fathers in painting to come to the year 1400, soon after which the chief schools began to form themselves. Andrea Mantegna was born in the year 1431, and of himself formed that admirable style which is to be seen in his triumphs of Julius Cæsar at Hampton Court.'

He then passes straight on to Raphael and Michael Angelo, and adds that the Roman school languished after the death of their disciples, but revived in almost all its glory in the person of Andrea Sacchi, with whose name he couples that of Pietro da Cortona, and proceeds to Carlo Maratti. In another passage he says, as blaming the bad taste of his own times :

You will perhaps see more paid for a picture of Andrea del Sarto, whose colouring was a mixture of mist and tawdry, whose drawing was hard and forced, than for the most graceful air of a Madonna that ever flowed from the pencil of Guido.'

The exaggerated estimate of the Bolognese school which was then entertained is thus expressed :—

This (the Bolognese school) which was as little inferior to the Roman as it was superior to all the rest; this was the school, that to the dignity of the antique joined all the beauty of living nature. There was no perfection in the others which was not assembled here. . . . . . In one point, I think, the Bolognese painters excelled every other master: their draperies are in a greater taste than even Raphael's. In my opinion all the qualities of a great painter never met but in Raphael, Guido, and Annibal Carracci.'

The expressions employed in some of his sentences to characterise different artists, and mark their relative excellences, cannot fail to entertain the reader. He speaks of the sweet 'neatness of Albano, and the attractive delicacy of Carlo Ma 'ratti;' and in the same page he remarks that

'Rotterhamer and Paul Brill, who travelled in Italy, contracted as

Written in 1743. It will be found in the second volume of the fourth edition of his works. (See for the following quotations, pp. 231, 226, 227-236.)

pleasing a style as any of the Italian masters. Lord Orford's landscapes of the latter are very near as fine, as pure, and as genteel as Claude's and Titian's.'

No word in the English language can in our ears be less applicable to the landscapes of Titian than the epithet genteel.'

6

When we come down later in the century, and turn to the Notes of Sir Joshua Reynolds, recently published by Mr. Tom Taylor, we find that our great painter in passing through Foligno contents himself with saying: 'Saw the picture by Raphael representing the Virgin and the Bambino.'* Even with reference to the Stanze of Raphael he expresses himself thus: Passing through on my return the rooms of Raphael, they appeared of an inferior order.' At Perugia not a word is said of the early works in the church of St. Francis. At Florence, Reynolds does not notice the works of Fra Angelico in the convent of St. Mark; and with reference to Santa Maria Novella, he writes: In the cloisters, the works of the Grecian 'painters'—meaning probably the frescoes of Gaddi and Memmi in the Capella degli Spagnuoli, but he adds nothing as to the work of Orcagna or the frescoes of Ghirlandaio- the only laudatory mention,' says Mr. Taylor, of any work in Florence earlier than Raphael relates to the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel.' Reynolds does not in these notes refer to the resemblance of Masaccio's figure of St. Paul to that of Raphael, although he dwells a good deal upon it in his twelfth discourse. This fact, as Mr. Taylor observes, renders it probable that he had not seen the cartoons when he left England, but he must have seen engravings from them. On the other hand, he observes that Raphael had borrowed his Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise from this series of frescoes. other portions of his writings, however, Reynolds has shown that he could appreciate the simplicity and love of truth of the early masters; but his mind was of course swayed strongly by the dominant fashion of the day, which looked upon the works of the Bolognese painters as the most perfect productions of art. In writing of the pictures at Bologna he does not even allude to Francia.

In

We are heartily thankful for the change in opinion, which has thrown academical productions into the background, and has caused us to collect the works and explore the history of men who painted with a genuine tenderness and reverence, rather than with a view to certain rules of composition and

Taylor's Life of Reynolds, vol. i. pp. 56, 41, 59, n. 61.

chiaroscuro. Our own leaning is altogether in favour of the masters who lived before the middle of the sixteenth century; but, on the other hand, we think Mr. Tom Taylor's caution is much needed: The fashionable judgment of our day is pro'bably as unfair to the later Bolognese painters in the way of ' depreciating, as that of Reynolds's time was in exaggerating their merits. The early schools and painters of the four'teenth and fifteenth centuries now run nearly the same risk ' of being extravagantly over-praised and over-studied as they ran of being unjustly overlooked and undervalued a hundred years ago."

6

The real merits of the question at issue between the taste of the present day and that of the last century are not very easy to try; and there is an intolerance in matters of art, as there is in matters of religion and of government, which arises from an overweening estimate of the value of our own convictions. as compared with those of other men. It is always easier to join a cry and cut the knot which presents a difficulty, than it is to weigh the arguments or analyse the feeling on which our prepossessions are founded. A man may deliberately prefer the earlier masters to those of the seventeenth century, and he may appreciate the solemn grandeur of a Gothic cathedral, whilst he is comparatively insensible to beauty of proportion as seen in a Greek temple or an Italian palace. But it is not necessary that he should treat as an idiot or as an incompetent critic every one whose sentiments on such matters of taste vary somewhat widely from his own. There are different types of excellence in pictorial art as there are in poetry; and that man receives the greatest amount of pleasure from both, who is able to feel the real excellence inherent in the masterpieces of different schools executed on different principles. Our admiration of Mr. Ruskin's acute and excellent discussions on matters of art is always diminished by the tendency which he shows to treat with contempt all who take for their guide a standard differing from his own. Because Turner was a great landscape painter, it does not seem to us to follow that Claude was a mere bungler or a mannerist; because the spire of Salisbury or the nave of Westminster Abbey are glorious works, it is not necessary to depreciate St. Paul's or Whitehall. Neither painting nor poetry can be felt as it ought to be felt, unless the reader or the spectator will take the trouble to understand and enter into the spirit in which the artist painted or the poet wrote.

* Taylor's Life of Reynolds, vol. i. p. 469.