inspection of the inhabitants of "modern Babylon." Is it not true, then, that the conditions under which the artist must now labour are such as have never before existed; and can he hope to meet the desires of an age which has the glories of the past spread before it as it were on a map, by a servile return to a style which arose, reached a noble maturity, and decayed, under a state of things totally different? If all England were Catholic to-morrow, a restoration of pointed architecture of the best date and execution,-cathedral, cloister, college, dwelling, would no more satisfy our present needs, artistic and domestic, than our present confusion satisfies the medievalists. To a political economist, if Mr. Ruskin's statistics are to be relied on, the matter might be worth a trial:

"In the Gothic times, writing, painting, carving, casting,-it mattered not what, were all works done by thoughtful and happy men; and the illumination of the volume, and the carving and casting of wall and gate, employed, not thousands, but millions, of true and noble artists over all Christian lands."

We were not aware that writing was so common an accomplishment in those days, and have heard that the sign-manual was not unfrequently made by a thumb dipped in ink and pressed on the paper. How many million building-artists there were may be estimated by the fact, that the scarcity of skilled labourers was the origin of the success of the monopoly of the Magistri Comacini, the Free-Masons, who travelled from place to place to supply the want, and had scarcely time to found their lodges and institute their schools before the architecture they so excelled in reached its limit of advance, and warned them that their hour was come. Their art had passed to others, and their privileges became a name. But, as with Gothic, so will it also be with Greek or Roman architecture; all attempts to revive them as distinctive styles will end in utter failure and disappointment. A Doric temple makes a bad museum, and Pompeii is out of place in Lombard Street. What then is the architect to do? how can the artist deal with those who after all must be his patrons? When the merchant comes to him and says, build me a Venetian palace; when the Puseyite gentleman orders a severely Gothic mansion, and the lucky gentleman from the Stock Exchange an Italian villa or a Swiss cottage, what can he do but draw on Barry, Pugin, and other wholesale houses, and so execute the order? Alas! it is so. But who is to blame? Mainly, we affirm, the architect himself. "He has abdicated his high office; he has been content to form the skeleton it should have been his task to clothe." He has neglected his own education, and those whom he should have taught have been left in ignorance. He has

studied one branch of his art to the exclusion of all others; he has used compasses instead of his hand, a foot-rule instead of his eye. He knows enough of construction, enough of proportion and detail-to imitate. In short, as Mr. Ruskin says, he is a builder, nothing else; his employers treat him as such, and they are right. But surely it is time to end all this. The noble works of every style lie open to him. He must learn to appreciate them with a frank and hearty justice. He must study the principles on which they were produced, not as barren technicalities, but as living germs, to be planted and fostered in his own mind. He must learn to deal with marble and mosaic as well as with brick and stone; he must ally himself with the skill of the painter and with the dexterity of the worker in metal. Besides all this, he must accept, without fear or regret, the circumstances under which he lives, emboldened by a vigorous determination to conquer indifference and coldness by a modest enthusiasm. He must not carp or rail at any new material which the wants of the day submit to his hands; rightly understood and felt, they are a gain and not a burden to him. Though Mr. Ruskin looks upon the use of iron, in construction, as a denial in effect that our Lord is the "Corner Stone," (p. 62) the young architect must learn to make it obedient to the laws of art; and he will find it no intractable substance under his teaching. Byzantium will have hinted to him that there are other uses for glass than the coarse and vulgar inlayings of a marble table, or even the rich colourings of a storied window.

In this generous and unselfish spirit, with a full and hearty appreciation of all beauty in nature as in art, let him enter on his career with youthful hope and energy. The service of the Church, the first and best of inspirations, is open to him; and in addition, a hundred modes in which the needs and fashions of the times await the grace and harmony which the artisttouch alone can give-that magic touch which finds the statue in the marble, and turns base things to gold. It may not be that the New Style, which shall express the wants, the sympathies, the history of the age we live in, shall call him master; but in his day he will have done good service, and be worthily remembered. In cultivating his own taste and judgment, he will have instructed others; in raising his own standard of the beautiful and true, he will have given a purer and better standard to the world he influences. In dealing with the past, he will doubtless dwell with a greater affection and delight on one age than another, as his natural tastes and the course of his studies may lead him: in one style he may see more capabilities, more variety than in any other; but in

applying it to the use of the present, he will treat it in the spirit of an artist, not with the sordid mechanism of an imitator. Mere imitation is the death of genius.

FINLAY'S BYZANTINE EMPIRE.

History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires, from 1057 to 1453. By George Finlay, Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Literature. Blackwood.

"HAPPY is he," says the Greek quotation which Mr. Finlay employs as the motto to his work, "who possesses the teaching of history."

Όλβιος ὅστις τῆς ἱστορίας
Ἔσχε μάθησιν.

Mr. Finlay himself may fairly claim to belong to that class of writers to whom those who would learn practical wisdom from the past may come for information. In the volume before us he brings to a conclusion his history of the Greek people, from their first conquest by the Romans to the extinction of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. He thus supplies a gap in English histories which is often felt by those who would trace the downward progress of that wonderful people who first led the way in European civilisation. He is fortunate, too, in bringing out his concluding volume at a time when popular attention is more than ordinarily turned to the theatre of the events he narrates.

Apart, however, from accidental sources of interest, the history of the gradual decay of the Greek Empire of Constantinople is pregnant with instruction peculiarly applicable in a state of society like that of Europe of the present day. It is impossible to overlook the fact, that with all our advance in civilisation, cultivation, and humanity, the races of Europe are more or less an enfeebled generation. Our virtues are too often the effects of weakness, and not the results of strength. Our points of similarity to the condition of the Greek Empire after its separation from the West, are, indeed, not flattering to our vanity; but they are nevertheless, though not numerous, yet so real, that a contemplation of the downward progress of Constantinople and her emperors cannot be without a painful interest and a certain profit. In speaking thus, at the same time, of the condition of modern Europe, we are far from implying that the Oriental or the American world is in any degree in a more vigorous condition than ourselves. The Orientals are notoriously already in decay;

and though it is the fashion to believe that the people of the United States is a young and healthy growing race, we are of opinion that its young manhood is so premature as to be destitute of enduring stamina, and that it gives no promise of a ripe maturity. The circumstances of Asia and America are, nevertheless, far from bearing the same similarity with our own to the Lower Greek Empire; and the student of Byzantine history will therefore read Mr. Finlay's pages with a reference to Europe in its present artificial and highly-wrought condition, rather than to Asia in its exhaustion or America in its headlong activity.

Mr. Finlay, as we have already implied, is a calm, steady, well-informed, and reflecting historian, whose object it is to instruct his readers, rather than to display his own powers of writing. The fashion of recent history, being adapted to the wants of a hasty, eager, and active, but not a pains-taking age, tends too much to the merging of the "narrative" in the "view." Books of great length are written, which are really little more than extended review "articles." We do not mean to say that this mode of composition has not its own peculiar merits and advantages, or to imply that a return to the simple, old-fashioned, unpretending "chronicles" is at all desirable. Still, when we want to form our own opinions; when we want to get as near the whole truth as existing historical documents will permit, we are constrained to desert writers of the school of Macaulay, Lamartine, and Thiers, and turn to those more solid and full narrators who think more of their subjects and less of themselves.

With one drawback, which he shares with too many others, Mr. Finlay is an agreeable and trustworthy example of these real historians. His information is complete, and the very reverse of second-hand. His mind is candid, observant, and reflecting. He brings to his task a desire to judge men as they were, as they showed themselves by their actions, and not by his own personal predilections. His style is easy, flowing, and wholly unpretending, though occasionally rising to vigour and picturesque brightness. At times, we think, he overloads his pages with details; but on the whole, he presents his pictures with sufficient unity and with a due subordination of parts. His "characters" are not overdrawn, nor do they imply that impossible minuteness of personal knowledge to which a popular school of modern writers lays pretence. Frequent anecdotes diversify the ordinary routine of political and military history, together with such fragments of information on social questions as the dull formality of the Byzantine historians permitted them to chronicle.

On one speculative point, and that an important one, we differ from Mr. Finlay. He seems to us very greatly to overrate the influence of government, as such, on the prosperity, power, and permanence of nations; and to overlook those other causes of progress or decadence which are rather the mainsprings than the effects of official action or political constitution. Nothing could have ultimately stayed the downward tendency of the Greek mind, and of the physical characteristics by which it was accompanied. Greece fell first before the Romans, then before the Normans, the Crusaders, and the Venetians, and lastly before the Turks, because the Greeks themselves were a people without moral or intellectual strength; a race given to formalism, astuteness, traditionalism, cruelty, chicane, and slavishness; and possessing, moreover, one of the most glorious countries in the world, with advantages and luxuries such as would have seduced a far nobler people into inglorious ease and cowardly languor. For centuries before their fall they were pre-eminent as liars; and whatever be the precise amount of moral guilt attaching to the sin of lying, it is certain that it is not one of the faults of a great and powerful people. Lying is the vice of those who, either morally or physically, are cowards; and so long as it remains a national characteristic, the people who practise it must be reckoned among the feeble and incapable varieties of the race of men.

The one drawback which we stated as existing to Mr. Finlay's general historical candour and information, is his adoption of the vulgar imputation of ambitious motives to those Popes who practically upheld the supremacy of the spiritual power over the temporal. Gregory VII. and Innocent III. are in his eyes men who must have been actuated by worldly and selfish, and not by Christian and self-denying principles. Now, of course, we do not expect Mr. Finlay, or any other Protestant, to recognise the rights of the Popes to the temporal jurisdiction which was exercised by Hildebrand and Innocent. Even to Catholics the question involved is open, and either side may be maintained. Still less, therefore, do we ask of Mr. Finlay that he should abstain from expressing his disapproval of the conduct of those Pontiffs in itself. What we complain of is, that what is accounted a virtue in a secular prince, is assumed to be a vice in a Pope. Not only is it assumed that it is not in accordance with the principles of Christianity that the Roman Pontiff should control kings, but it is not even allowed that any Pope could conscientiously hold a different opinion, and act upon it with a pure motive. Why is it to be taken for granted that what may be laudable