postal traffic," and would "take measures to defeat their opponents." They would combine, in short, against each other and the public; the well-paying districts would be well supplied, and the ill-paying neglected. There would be no control or combined action, no tribunal to which we might appeal for redress.

But the tables, happily, are not going to be turned in this way. Instead of giving over the postage to private companies, we are more likely to take the railways out of their hands, unless they manage them better. Let no one, at all events, deride the scheme as Utopian. Our friends the railway reformers threaten us with the charge of having contracted minds, incapable of great ideas, if we oppose them. If we say it is mere dreaming to talk of reducing railway fares to one-third, they reply, that it is well for the world there are some dreamers, for otherwise it would never make progress. They are afraid we should have been among those who imprisoned Solomon de Caus as a madman, because he insisted that he could construct a carriage which would propel itself by steam,* if we had lived in Paris in 1641; or should have chimed in with that famous article in the Quarterly Review of March 1825, which scouted the idea of general railroads as "altogether impracticable" and "unworthy of notice," and declared that it would "back old Father Thames against the Woolwich Railway for any sum."

The progress of society may be traced by comparing the Reviews of different periods. The Quarterly, which spoke so wittily and so blindly of railways in 1825, had, of course, in 1844 completely changed its tone. In the July number for that year it said: "It is impossible not to see that the system is developing itself to such an extent, penetrating all districts, superseding all other communications, affecting every species of public and private interests, and acting as the life-blood arteries of the empire, as to render it probable, almost to certainty, that the time must come when this great public trust can no longer be left to the management of private companies scattered over the face of the country. In truth, it seems only a question of time; railways must be made subject to some unity of management, and, through whatever intermediate process it may pass, that management must finally be vested in the Government of the country."

If

Twenty-one years have passed since these words were penned, and, if truth admits of degrees, they are truer than ever now. England is a richer country than Belgium, that is no reason why Englishmen should pay the railway companies more than is needful, or forego advantages which Belgians enjoy. The experiment of the *Century of Inventions, by the Marquis of Worcester.

greatest possible cheapness has been tried among them with great success, but it will never be tried among us under the present system. The companies are, unfortunately, much more inclined to try how high they can raise their tariffs than how low they can reduce them; and notwithstanding the banter and bluster with which they may oppose a sweeping change, we may in this matter have full confidence in the superior wisdom of our rulers.

If all that is said be true, it is strange that so few attempts should have been made to rouse the public from its state of contentment on this subject. It would form an exciting topic in an election. speech. "If we do not wish cheap travelling," the candidate might say, "to be confined to particular days, but extended to every day in the year-if we should like to keep our birthdays oftener in the spot where we first saw the light, to explore at will the scenery and the wonders of our native isle, to see whole schools travelling about in the vacation, as they do in Germany, and learning to love their fatherland the more, because they know it better-if we would have the mails carried with the utmost safety and despatch to the remotest districts, and book ourselves through from any one station to another however distant, because all our railways, extending over more than 12,000 miles, are amalgamated-if in time of invasion, riot, or revolt, it would comfort us to know that troops and warlike stores are conveyed without delay to any part of the kingdom-if in seasons of difficulty, such as have lately been experienced in Lancashire, we might hope to ward off much of the distress by friendly visits to the scene of dearth, or by receiving the sufferers to the homes of their youth or the factories of their earlier employers—if by freer intercourse between those who live widely apart we might in time drive out from the corners in which they still linger the languages and dialects which impede civilisation—if we would suffer no extra steam power to go to waste, by drawing much less than it might-if we would have the very best machinery at work, and tested constantly by vigilant inspectors-if we should hail as a boon the readier conveyance of furniture, horses, carriages, the labours of the loom and the treasures of the mine, exports, imports, and every article of trade, then most certainly we must absolutely refuse to be satisfied with any thing less than the full development of railway economy; we must cooperate with the benevolent designs of the Royal Commission to inquire into railroad charges, and express our convictions with becoming earnestness. The marvels already achieved by steam are the best guarantee for the attainment of still greater triumphs and rewards. We have made travelling expeditions; be it ours also to make expeditious travelling cheap."

Art and Beauty.

It is exceedingly difficult to write intelligibly on art. Not, indeed, from the inherent difficulty and intricacy of the subject, though it is difficult, but from the impatience of readers, who do not care to be forced to the labour of reasoning when they seek to be pleased. Every one takes pleasure, more or less intelligent, in art, and it is not always agreeable to be called to account for likes and dislikes where the object is simply to receive pleasure.

Now it is quite true that this love of art ought not to stand in need of rules. If the intelligence and the affections of every beholder were rightly informed and truly balanced, a right and true pleasure would be produced by good art, in exact proportion to its goodness— that is, its attainment of its proper object. But it is by no means true that every lover of art is informed in his affection or balanced as to his judgment. And yet we live in days in which art is widely pursued and sought after by many admirers.

The very quantity of pictures, and in a less degree of sculptures, is perplexing, and the diversity of them is evidence enough of the loose state of principles, the want of recognition of fixed laws, and of marked character of originality proper to the age. The immense activity in house-building, church-building, the spread of museums and galleries, the general increase of luxury, is marked by a degree of discordance in artistic aim unknown heretofore. Efforts, indeed, have been made to plant a style of architecture. We have seen them carried to the ordeal of battle in the House of Commons, and sustaining defeat. The confusion spreads in this matter; for as old monuments and cities are studied, drawn, and published with minutest details, and as the use of photography puts before our architects an increasing range of old materials, it becomes the chief object of ambition to work them up in a novel manner.

Sculpture and painting, arts in the more proper meaning of the word, cannot be pursued in this mechanical way, but must of necessity command devotion and skill, if any kind of excellence is to be reached.

There is not, perhaps, here all the perplexing variety alluded to; but still the want of definite aim and marked type or style makes it difficult for any general judgment to be soundly established.

The very safety which a good system or a sound tradition of art has given to the people who lived under its influence, all feeling secure in the general instinct, is turned into danger when this tradition is either not generally received, or full of opposing voices, or of feeble and vicious tendency. Instead of a sound tradition, we then fall under the rule of a fashion, and that liable to endless change. The argument, sound enough in itself, that what gives pleasure to so many must be right in art, takes for granted faith in their capacity to judge it. Where this does not exist, submission to mere fashion on the part of ignorant persons is fatal to a right feeling, for then no one is at the pains of learning for himself.

A greater difficulty, perhaps, than this lies in the apparent ease of judging the kind of art most popular at present-homely passages of common life and landscape. In proportion as the subjects of pictures, from their own nature, relieve us of any need of thought or reflection, ordinary observation will be considered sufficient to give us a right judgment concerning them. And where a loose, easy attention is the limit that works of art claim from the beholder, the mind becomes enfeebled in its powers of perception, it becomes fatigued with art of a deeper kind, it fails to keep up any high standard of beauty before it, and cannot see any that lies below the surface.

This homeliness of aim and poverty of thought in the artist react upon the public, and save it the trouble, and even discourage the desire, of observing more carefully what is really beautiful in nature, and deepening and refining its perception of art. Hence the very suggestion of laws and principles with which our judgment should agree sounds like pedantry. People ask why, so long as they are themselves pleased by a picture or any other work of art, it should signify why they are pleased? How can taste, for instance, which is involuntary, and takes pleasure in different things of opposite flavour, according to the natural diversity of men's palates, be subjected to rule? And how can the eye, which also takes a natural and quite involuntary delight in opposite objects in different people,—how can the eye be blamed or praised for its diversity in this respect?

Now, to write at all on the principles of art is to imply the justice of such praise and such blame. It is to maintain that art has laws; that taste ought to be schooled; that there are standards of comparison.

Beginning with the subject of the taste, we might lay it down. as certain that, whatever natural diversity there is in palates, yet that some objects and some flavours are better than others, that those are certainly the better which please the greatest number-that is, the greatest number of instructed persons. Those that study the sub

ject, whatever their likes or dislikes, come, after repeated trial, to certain conclusions. First impressions grow weak, or repeated trials exhaust the pleasure of certain coarser preferences, and those which on trial have been most widely approved maintain their ground.

Here we speak only of the lower kind of relish of what is good or agreeable. The palate retains its relish for the most refined and studied flavours the longest, but even these pall by repetition. At last they destroy the palate itself, unless the rule of moderation is observed. The pleasures of taste being given to serve one useful and needful end, can afford but a low measure of enjoyment, and, moreover, are destructive of the capacity of enjoyment if more than a restricted use is made of them.

The fact, however, is acknowledged, that as nations and people themselves lose their coarser and less cultivated habits, they come to acknowledge standards and rules of taste of this kind, and that for each person some measure of cultivation of the taste is needed to enable him to understand and allow of these rules.

If these lower tastes are capable of training, and if training is needed to fit them for the full enjoyment of which they have the capacity, much more is this true of the higher enjoyments of which the eye is capable. The eye is the instrument by which light finds its way not to the brain only, but through the brain into ourselves. The awe, wonder, delight, which the creation around us, and the drama of life acted before us, bear in upon our brain and heart, is reflected in through the instrumentality of the eye. Images and scenes that come to us in the way of reading, or of report, or conversation, convey their meaning to the brain through notions and images which the past experience of the eye enables us to picture within.

If we read or hear of history, of a great event, a battle, a death, or a remarkable scene, more or less quickly these communications fit into some image or combination of images we have stored in the memory through its former acquisitions, all of which have been brought to it by the powers of the eye. We do not conceive of any thing but by some use, or some deduction from images of this kind.

What may be the mental conceptions of the blind by birth we cannot say. How, e.g., they can conceive of the colours red and blue, or of the visible beauty of the world. These are exceptions altogether beyond our understanding. We are concerned now with the general law.

The eye is the light of the body. That which gives it its own proper enjoyment is beauty. Beauty is the delight of the eyes. The beauty of all external objects is what draws us towards them.