We may conclude with a few words on Mr. Burne-Jones's position and style. He is thought to take his figures bodily out of the land of dreams; he really studies more and more closely from nature as the years go on; and the number of elaborate studies which precede the painting of each department of a great picture would astonish those who do not realise of what patient labour genius is prodigal, and how as the Chinese sage says, if the ordinary man should succeed by ten efforts, the superior man will succeed by a hundred. Mr. Burne-Jones's process may be one of selection, of transformation, but an actual face is always held within his most shadowy and ideal conceptions. He likes the support of feeling that his work is sane and sound, and that though it sift Nature by a poetic standard, it was Nature that set it going. His aim however is not to repeat nature, but to make the unmade. The pictures of those who with extreme realistic feeling strive to mimic nature he has been known to say are often pleasant to him to look upon, but not what he longs to do. His pictures are not of life as it is, but of life as he would have it to be, of life purged from its dross and made perfect and pure, and beautiful in freedom. A man's picture, if his hand be untouched by affectation, is his heart's longing and his life's ideal.

This mystical painter would be, and is, own brother to the poet, and as such should be appreciated. Poetic ideas in art he would regard as. brotherly to, but not identical with, poetical ideas expressed in literature; and many a subject he would put away as belonging more properly to verse; doubtless with the greater pleasure watching his friend William Morris work it out. Within the field occupied by the ray of colour, and defined by the boundary of line, he finds his full expression and the natural home of his ideas; recognising the while that the English have a stronger bent up to the present for poetic expression in literature than in art.

He may be said to have a bias for a classic mould for his ideas, and to a certain extent, perhaps, the allegation may be true. But the modern world, with its bodies swathed and hidden in the ugly black coat or the latest fashion of the milliner, would afford but a constrained and realistic mode of expression. The Hebrew legend-world, though remote enough for art, and streaked with power and beauty, and though in a sense familiar to the bulk of the community, has its objections on account of the doctrinal prejudices attached to it. The Scandinavian epics he might like to take, but the way of appreciation seems not yet to be enough prepared. But upon whatever periods he may place the scaffolding of his compositions, his perpetual attempt is to unchronologise the time, to make his scenes transact themselves in no fixed era at all, but in the eternal time of beauty. His landscapes are designedly landscapes of fairyland, or of no man's land. Passions proper to all time, permanent qualities of human nature, are the root of his work; whether associated

with Egypt, Assyria, or Greece, matters not to him so long as they come within the scope of what he loves to treat.

Classical or medieval as he may be in form, he is essentially modern in feeling and spirit. His Pygmalion is full of the true fire, but the care of the painter has been in the representation of the poetic side of him rather than in studied niceties of the archæology of Cyprus. His Venus is not of Greece or Italy, but a vision of the Venus of men's heartsa Celtic Venus, if she have any nationality.

Certain comparatively new-born qualities that belong to our time he seems very fully to have absorbed into his work-the strange wistfulness, the pathetic sentiment that has come with modern cultivation; even the halting hesitancy which compares with the truculent fierceness that endows the heroes of old time with dramatic manhood. In these times all times seem to flow together; so much history with its gathered results is fused into our minds, that a wonder and sympathy is perforce awakened for things gone by, and if a painter absorbs the strange tale of the world into his work, it is no wonder if it be not over cheerful, or over positive, as the work of those who saw around them only the simple vigour and ignorance of their own clan.

In the method of Mr. Burne-Jones's work, the action of a limb, as carrying out the conception of the whole composition, would be a matter of intense interest, while the drawing of subordinate details, provided the result did not look ugly, would not give him anxiety, even if slightly wrong in anatomy, or dubious in perspective. It must not be forgotten that what is called the "poetic licence" has been allowed in all ages, and to great poets. Accuracy is essentially a scientific quality; in painting it cannot be lost sight of, but if beauty were subordinated to it, there might be a sorry result.

Mr. Burne-Jones, as a painter, may claim all he will of the poet's privileges; his pictures are representations of ideal beauty and abstract romance, containing little or no story but that of the loveliness itself of the forms, or the undercurrent of meaning in the relation of the groups of the figures, and no less of the colours in which they shine. We should imagine that William Morris's dedication of his "Earthly Paradise" would form a very fit definition also of the purpose of much of Mr. Burne-Jones's work. We feel confident that it would help many people in their appreciation of him to regard him rather from the poetical than the technical side. Except to a mind highly educated in the subtle suggestiveness, and even parabolic character, which is enshrined in departments of life where it is often little expected, Mr. Burne-Jones's pictures may present a study offering some little difficulty at first. But this is no objection to a great poet, who, if truly unconventional and with a message of his own, may remain an object of scorn for a generation or more. And why similarly should it be any objection

to a painter that the whole produce and speech of his 'soul cannot be estimated and run dry in an hour? Mr. Burne-Jones is at present very busy accumulating studies for a picture in progress, which is to be "The Fountain of Youth." We watch with great interest the position he is taking in English art, and welcome the memorable additions which he is making to the food, not as yet too plentiful, of our higher faculties.

GAVOTTE.

THE gavotte or gavot originated in the dance of the Gavots, or men of the Pays de Gap, who inhabited a town of that name in Upper Dauphiné, in France. About that period, as a social dance, it was very much used. A celebrated contemporary of Händel named Mattheson (1681-1764), says, with reference to the gavotte, "the expression should be that of a right jubilant joy;" the "jumping" movement is a particular feature of it, and by no means the "running." All gavottes are not accompanied by the musette, the peculiarity of which is, that the fundamental or "drone bass" never changes, thus imitating the quaint, monotonous sound of the bagpipe; but the addition of the musette affords variety, thus relieving a composition, which may have to be constantly repeated, of a monotony, which after a time, would otherwise become somewhat tiresome. Cotgrave calls the gavotte a kind of brawl, danced commonly by one alone. Arbuthnot and Pope in Martinus Scriblerus remarks: "The disposition in a fiddle to play tunes in preludes, sarabands, jigs and gavots, are real qualities in the instrument." Littré says its original peculiarity as a danse grave was, that the dancers lifted their feet from the ground, while in former danses graves they walked or shuffled. The gavotte must begin on the third beat of the bar, and finish with a half bar.

The musette which may be called a second gavotte, is generally similar in construction, and although differing somewhat in form for the sake of variety, should be built up as far as possible on the central idea of the first gavotte. The best known illustration of a gavotte with a musette founded on its opening phrase is that by J. S. Bach in G minor, said to have been written in the period 1685-1750. For the sake of variety the musette is written in the major key, which is a great relief to the ear, especially when the carefully marked nuances are attended to by the player. Among those who have left specimens of this class of composition behind them are Arcangelo Corelli, 1653-1713, Johann Baptist Loeillet, François Couperin, Jean Philippe Rameau, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Friedrich Händel, Jean Marie Leclair, Martini, J. Exaudet, Gluck, Kirnberger, and others who flourished and enjoyed greater or less renown from the date mentioned down to the beginning of the last century.