adversity between the schools of classic and Christian art, only in part conquered by the most liberal-minded of artists and poets; Nicholas of Pisa accepts indeed the technical aid of antiquity, but with much loss to his Christian sentiment; Dante uses the imagery of Eschylus for the more terrible picturing of the Hell to which, in common with the theologians of his age, he condemned his instructor; but while Minos and the Furies are represented by him as still existent in Hades, there is no place in Paradise for Diana or Athena. Contrariwise, the later revival of the legends of antiquity meant scorn of those of Christendom. It is but fifty years ago that the value of the latter was again perceived and represented to us by Lord Lindsay: and it is only within the time which may be looked back to by the greater number even of my younger auditors, that the transition of Athenian mythology, through Byzantine, into Christian, has been first felt, and then traced and proved, by the penetrative scholarship of the men belonging to this Pre-Raphaelite school, chiefly Mr. Burne-Jones and Mr. William Morris. -A. E., II.

42. ENGLISH LANDSCAPE.-In the climates of Greece and Italy, the monotonous sunshine, burning away the deep colours of everything into white and gray, and wasting the strongest mountain-streams into threads among their shingle,

alternates with the blue-fiery thundercloud, with sheets of flooding rain, and volleying musquetry of hail. But throughout all the wild uplands of the former Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, from Edwin's crag to Hilda's cliff, the wreaths of softly resting mist, and wandering to and fro of capricious shadows of clouds, and drooping swathes, or flying fringes, of the benignant western rain, cherish, on every moorland summit, the deep-fibred moss, embalm the myrtle,-gild the asphodel,enchant along the valleys the wild grace of their woods, and the green elf land of their meadows; and passing away, or melting into the translucent calm of mountain air, leave to the open sunshine a world with every creature ready to rejoice in its comfort, and every rock and flower reflecting new loveliness to its light.

Perhaps among the confusedly miscellaneous examples of ancient and modern, tropic or arctic art, with which I have filled the niches of your schools, one, hitherto of the least noticeable or serviceable to you, has been the dark Copley Fielding drawing above the fireplace;-nor am I afraid of trusting your kindness with the confession, that it is placed there more in memory of my old master, than in the hope of its proving of any lively interest or use to you. But it is now some fifty years since it was brought in triumph to Herne Hill, being the first picture my father ever bought, and in so far the foundation of the

subsequent collection, some part of which has been permitted to become permanently national at Cambridge and Oxford. The pleasure which that single drawing gave on the morning of its installation in our home was greater than to the purchaser accustomed to these times of limitless demand and supply would be credible, or even conceivable; and our back parlour for that day. was as full of surprise and gratulation as ever Cimabue's joyful Borgo.

The drawing represents, as you will probably -not-remember, only a gleam of sunshine on a peaty moor, bringing out the tartan plaids of two Highland drovers, and relieved against the dark gray of a range of quite featureless and nameless distant mountains, seen through a soft curtain of rapidly drifting rain.

Some little time after we had acquired this unobtrusive treasure, one of my fellow students,-it was in my undergraduate days at Christ Church -came to Herne Hill to see what the picture might be which had afforded me so great ravishment. He had himself, as afterwards Kinglake and Curzon, been urged far by the thirst of oriental travel; the chequer of plaid and bonnet had for him but feeble interest after having worn. turban and capote; and the gray of Scottish hillside still less, to one who had climbed Olympus and Abarim. After gazing blankly for a minute or two at the cheerless district through which lay

the drovers' journey, he turned to me and said, "But, Ruskin, what is the use of painting such very bad weather?" And I had no answer, except that, for Copley Fielding and for me, there was no such thing as bad weather, but only different kinds of pleasant weather-some indeed inferring the exercise of a little courage and patience; but all, in every hour of it, exactly what was fittest and best, whether for the hills, the cattle, the drovers-or my master and me.

Be the case as it might,—and admitting that in a certain sense the weather might be bad in the eyes of a Greek or a Saracen,-there was no question that to us it was not only pleasant, but picturesque; and that we set ourselves to the painting of it, with as sincere desire to represent the to our minds-beautiful aspect of a mountain shower, as ever Titian a blue sky, or Angelico a golden sphere of Paradise. Nay, in some sort, with a more perfect delight in the thing itself, and less colouring of it by our own thoughts or inventions. For that matter, neither Fielding, nor Robson, nor David Cox, nor Peter de Wint, nor any of this school, ever had much thought or invention to disturb them. They were, themselves, a kind of contemplative cattle, and flock of the field, who merely liked being out of doors, and brought as much painted fresh air as they could, back into the house with them.

Neither must you think that this painting of fresh air is an entirely easy or soon managed business. You may paint a modern French emotional landscape with a pail of whitewash and a pot of gas-tar in ten minutes, at the outside. I don't know how long the operator himself takes to it-of course some little more time must be occupied in plastering on the oil-paint so that it will stick, and not run; but the skill of a good plasterer is really all that is required, -the rather that in the modern idea of solemn symmetry you always make the bottom of your picture, as much as you can, like the top. You put seven or eight streaks of the plaster for your sky, to begin with; then you put in a row of bushes with the gas-tar, then you rub the ends of them into the same shapes upside down-you put three or four more streaks of white, to intimate the presence of a pool of water-and if you finish off with a log that looks something like a dead body, your picture will have the credit of being a digest of a whole novel of Gaboriau, and lead the talk of the

season.

Far other was the kind of labour required of even the least disciple of the old English watercolour school. In the first place, the skill of laying a perfectly even and smooth tint with absolute precision of complex outline was attained to a degree which no amateur draughtsman can have the least conception of. Water-colour, under the