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not selfishly, but as seeing therein high duties and opportunities of usefulness to which we mean to be equal. Does this sound like a recurrence of the old braggart habit? Not too seriously so, it may be hoped; for it really represents an earnest attitude of the American mind.

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During more than a generation past no traveller has neglected to allege an omnipresent 'materialism' in the United States. The phrase is vague, yet obviously im plies reproach, as of a lack of intellectuality and idealism, a 'manque d'idées abstraites,' a dearth of poets, artists, and philosophers. It also implies, however, the presence of substantial good things. Material industries and creations bring to the people at large possibilities for education, cleanliness, health, and comfort; they mean meat at least once every day, bathrooms in all save the poorest apartments, abundant clothing for the children, space enough for decent living in well-warmed, welllighted quarters. If the materialism' which secures these things for millions leaves some hundreds to suffer a little poverty in the way of art and music, and brilliant or scholarly books, we may be sorry for the hundreds, but we would not consent to reverse the situation. So when Mr Wells and M. Adam note that there is nothing definitive with us, that we are always tearing down in order to rebuild, it means only that every man means to die in a better-built, more wholesome and more comfort able house than that in which he was born. This is a fruit of 'materialism,' and a good fruit. The American thinks much of his house, and is aghast to hear M. Huret allege that the people have no home life, and customarily frequent restaurants.

It is true that, as concerns literature, art, scholarship, music, the stage, even the national genius for boasting stands silent and abashed. Admittedly we achieve little in painting, and not more in music. Our stage is-but let an American be excused from saying what the American stage is to-day! In literature we believe that we stand better, though Mr Whibley says that our best writers are mere copyists of bygone styles, and others seem able to praise only our short stories, the sugar-plums of literature, with which your cordons bleus rarely meddle.

At present our best work is being done in history and allied subjects, as witness Prof. Lowell's remarkable work on the Government of England,' and Mr Rhodes' History of the United States,' which is marked by a tone of such judicial fairness towards both men and measures that it finds no superior since the days of Thucydides. In departments less purely literary it is true that we make but an indifferent show. The opinions of our highest courts, the messages of our Presidents, and other State papers, generally prolix, inflated, and clumsy in form, indicate a sad lack of training in clear expression. The turgid oratory of our public men is deplorable in its grotesque, almost burlesque, magnificence. In philosophy, we boast chiefly, and very justly, of Prof. Wiliam James; but probably it is his rare personal charm and his gift of well-chosen language which, more than his subject, attract us; for the material' American is apt to contemplate philosophy, with its succession of theories, much as one watches a child toilsomely construct a house of cards for another child to blow down.

As for scholarship, M. Huret warns us against trusting the tales one hears of American classicism and taste for European literature, for he finds little of either. Yet there is a bent in the direction of scholarship which may carry us forward in the future, though unfortunately education, even in our universities, suffers too much from materialism.' Mgr Vay de Vaya finds that our 'greatest pedagogues' admit this materialism'; and he adds that our skill lies especially in imparting applied knowledge, which we regard as an investment that can be turned to immediate account. All praise the equipment of the 'rich, comfortable, and practical' universities, but many see only fine buildings and appointments produced by money. Certainly some of our universities have only lately emerged from the constructive era; and competent professors and throngs of students hardly pour into the rooms as the workmen move out of them. But with astonishing rapidity the newest universities gather an abundance both of those who teach well and those who learn earnestly. After all, scholarship is for a chosen few in every nation, and we shall furnish our fair proportion. The assertion made by Dr Münsterberg, and echoed by Mr Whibley, that we shall have no high

scholarship till we pay high salaries to our scholars, is, we believe, untrue. Meantime, however, it is undeniable that not foreigners only but many among ourselves complain that our universities tend to become great factories of instruction. Even Harvard, the most ancient college of the land, encrusted in traditions of literature and scholarship, has of late been irreverently compared to a huge department-store with counters for the sale of every known kind of instruction. This is distasteful to the disappearing generation; but their successors evidently believe that nothing better can be desired than that instruction should be obtained in the best form upon every subject concerning which instruction is desired; and indeed it is not easy to controvert this position.

In all these matters we ask for a little time. The American does not admit that 'non omnia possumus omnes,' at least if the 'omnes' are Americani.' M. Bourget notes that at forty, fifty, or even sixty years of age a man may change his calling, and prove 'que l'homme énergique accepte tout et qu'il triomphe de tout, pourvu qu'il le veuille.' It never occurs to any one of old American stock to doubt his capacity immediately to fill any position or to discharge any functions which the chances of life may throw in his way. A lawyer becomes secretary of the navy; a stable-keeper is mayor of a city; a physician is made a general in the army; a merchant is chosen as a legislator; a newspaper-editor becomes a diplomatist; and it is well known that any public school graduate is competent to become President. This power to dispense with all preliminary preparation astonishes a European, but it is the normal condition of the American citizen. Even he, however, admits the limitation that, though he certainly can do all things, yet he cannot do them all at once. For the moment we are fully occupied with industrial creations and the exploitation of the natural resources of the country. For the matters to which we have not yet had opportunity to give sufficient attention we say only,' Give us just a little more time.'" JOHN T. MORSE.

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Art. 3.-THE EARLIEST ENGLISH ILLUSTRATORS OF DANTE.

1. A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure, and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur. By Mr [Jonathan] Richardson. London: Churchill, 1719. 2. The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds. By James Northcote. Two vols. London: Colburn, 1812.

3. Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Works. By William Cotton. Edited by John Burnet. London: Longmans, 1859.

4. Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli. By John Knowles. Three vols. London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831. 5. Compositions from the Divine Poem of Dante Alighieri, containing Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Engraved by Thomas Piroli, from the Drawings by John Flaxman in the possession of Thomas Hope, Esq., 1793. London: Longmans, etc., 1807.

Blake's Illustrations of Dante. Seven Plates, designed and engraved by W. Blake. London, 1827.

7. Life of William Blake. By Alexander Gilchrist. Two vols. London: Macmillan, 1863.

& Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. Selected and edited by Thomas Sadler. Three vols. London: Macmillan, 1869.

And other works.

THERE is probably no writer in any language,' observes Macaulay, who has presented so many strong pictures to the mind as Dante'; and elsewhere he says, 'his poetry picturesque beyond any that ever was written. Its effect approaches to that produced by the pencil or the chisel. This characteristic of the Divina Commedia' at an early date attracted Italian artists. Giotto is reputed to have drawn inspiration from Dante for some of the subjects of his frescoes at Padua, Naples, and Assisi; while Bernardo Orcagna's great fresco of Hell in the Strozzi chapel of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, which was painted within forty years of Dante's death, follows Dante so closely that it may almost rank as an illustration of the poem. At the close of the next century Luca Signorelli painted in the Cappella della Madonna of the Cathedral of Orvieto, in continuation of the work of

Fra Angelico, eleven arabesques in grisaille, the subjects of which were taken from the first eleven cantos of the 'Purgatorio'; and he also painted a 'Last Judgment in the same chapel, some of the details of which are obvi ously derived from Dante.

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To the illuminators of manuscripts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the 'Commedia' naturally offered a wide field for illustration; but, so far as can be ascer tained, no artist of note set himself seriously to illustrate the poem until Botticelli undertook the task as a commis sion for one of the Medici family. Vasari informs us that Botticelli made illustrations to the 'Inferno,' and caused them to be printed—‘figurò lo Inferno e lo mise a stampa'; and there can be no reasonable doubt that the plates, nineteen in number, which accompany certain special copies of the first Florentine edition of the 'Commedia' (1481), were engraved from his designs. It was probably for purely technical reasons that no more of Botticelli's designs were utilised for this edition. That the artist practically completed the whole series was known from the statement of an anonymous writer of the sixteenth century, who, in his 'Notizie de' Pittori Fiorentini da Cimabue a Michelangelo,' records that Botticelli dipinse e storiò un Dante in cartapecora a Lorenzo di Piero Francesco de' Medici, il che fu cosa maravigliosa tenuto'; that is, he painted and illustrated a copy of the 'Commedia' on parchment, which was accounted a marvellous performance. This precious volume, of which Vasari evidently knew nothing, was lost sight of for several centuries; and its whereabouts remained unknown until it was at last discovered by Waagen, some fifty years ago, among the art treasures in the Duke of Hamilton's collection at Hamilton Palace. Waagen was only able to make a cursory inspection of the drawings, but at the Hamilton sale in 1882 the volume was purchased for the Berlin Museum; and a few years later the whole of the Hamilton drawings, together with eight others by the same hand discovered in the Vatican, which by some chance had become separated from the rest, were made accessible to the world at large in a facsimile reproduc tion published at Berlin.

Between 1586 and 1588 another Italian artist, Federigo Zucchero, illustrated the Commedia' in a series of

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