of the life of a few people. So that May's great wish for him came about quite naturally.

He had been hard at work on full-size cartoons for mosaic and fresco; the walls were dry enough to admit of their being set in their places; the authorities and a certain number of friends had come, seen, and approved. The apse and chancel were to be done in mosaic, the rest of the church in dry-fresco of faint hues and broad masses, not in monochrome, but with colour subordinate to the richer tessellation. The pavement again was to be 'opus Alexandrinum;' all black, red, and white, with half-symbolisms of doves and peacocks, drinking birds, palms and olives. All the forms were rather severe, but in correct outline, and maintained that character of the primitive or classicalChristian age, which all practical workers will find highly suitable to the strong Roman element of Norman or Early English architecture. His kindly little jury were mostly gone, and the desert of Oxford was left to its peace; but two or three remained to enjoy a week or so of deep summer in the ancient gardens and cool thick-walled college rooms, whose owners were, as usual, dispersed to the ends of the earth. The Herons were come home from their wedding tour, and threatened a descent on old haunts; Highcliffe, the great Fellow of S. Homonovus's, and editor of the Oxford Quarterly, was writing history in his rooms, and had got, as he said, ' embedded' in his survey of arts beyond extrication, unless Cawthorne would help him. So he sat with Charles for hours, in studio and on platform, picked his willing brains, and gave him ideas and wrinkles enough in return. Also May and the Provost had had committed to their joint chaperonage at the Lodge a certain Miss Creyke, of Creykerne, a Northern beauty, who had developed a great taste for painting, gained sundry prizes she did not want, and begun to study under Charles; she had sprung eagerly at the distinction of helping in his backgrounds. Highcliffe and she had met at Kirk-Otterscope, Hugh Heron's Yorkshire place, and it was now and then surmised that the formidable Countess of Wharfedale, the Provost's daughter, was at her old tricks again, with May aiding and abetting as usual. There seemed little or no symptoms, however, of further rapprochement between the parties immediately concerned, beyond their present footing of easy acquaintance and half-friendship, which was now an affair of months, or even years.

Between history and archæology with Highcliffe, painting and design with Carry Creyke, governing body, architect, and general criticism, Charles got into a state of fatigue and collapse. He had gallops on Port Meadow in the early morning, rowed the ladies about of evenings, and took all the exercise he could; but he was very anxious indeed about his work; he said his life seemed slipping from him, with nothing done. He generally went into despondency before dinner; reaction set in with his soup, and his spirits commonly recovered their tone about the period of cheese and college proof ale, a

diurnal ration of which liquid was allowed him by the authorities, as to a person temporarily attached to the Foundation. They all met at dinner at the Provost's, or had Hall or Common-room banquets in a modest way. They all talked art with all their might except just at dinner; after which they never sat long, as in that glorious summer weather the Provost's garden was pleasanter than any room. But there coffee and conversation, not altogether untainted by suspicion of cigarettes, went on till one can't tell how late.

It fell out that Charles was particularly inclined to mope and growl one evening. Some fresco colours had failed to stand lime; he had had a furious No-Popery letter, and his wife and the Provost thought it was time to begin to administer tonics, or rather, after the fashion of Oxford, counter-irritants, by questioning the use of Art altogether. So May went at him as follows:

May. I think this is the third time you have observed that all is vanity, my dear Chawls. Of course you don't mean me; but art, and your hitherto misspent life, generally speaking.

Charles. Do include yourself in the results of my misspent time and trouble-and the children.

Provost. Now be good to May, sir; and May, we don't allow curtain lectures in college. But, Charley, you must believe in yourself and your work a little more; the religious and irreligious world are both turning against you; and what's more, they are at us too.

Charles. I mean to paint on; ask Highcliffe if I don't.

Highcliffe. Well, but the Provost is under suspicion for giving you walls to paint on, by the Protestant world; and all the scientific race are girding at him, for not spending the money in dissecting-rooms and chemicals.

Charles. Why, Cliffe, you ought to say something. My business is to paint, not to talk about it. I don't mean to argue my own raison d'être. Perhaps I'm not too sure I have one. What a set of Job's comforters you are-wife and all. Only the faithful Caroline

May and Caroline. Now we won't stand any nonsense. You've had ever such a dinner, and ought to rest and be thankful, and mind your Provost.

Charles. Do tell me what's what at once, Provost; and let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women rail on the

May and Caroline. Fiddle.

Provost (judicially). I do want you, or Highcliffe as spokesman, to magnify your office a little. It seems to me that the whole cause or case of art, as an important thing of the spirit, or as a worthy intellectual occupation, has to be set forth again. It was meant for great thoughts, and ideas, and aspirations, and expressions of things, in fact, unspeakable; and it has all come down together, poetry and painting. Colourless costume, and ballades in blue china, that's about the whole result worth mentioning, and excluding things not fit to mention. You

must speak for yourselves, or the whole generation will go by you. Forty years ago, when Ruskin began to write on art, we thought of high things, and purity, and rejoicing in the works of God's hands; and now we've come to rejoicing in crockery, and Japan screens, and twiddling rhymes.

Charles. Well, that's somebody's fault; but whose? Is it your world's the religious, and theological, and respectable? or Highcliffe's and mine? I don't mean that you really included us in the irreligious world just now; but both our tastes are considered secular and freethinking.

Highcliffe. These things are everybody's fault, you know. It's demand and supply, after all. The religious world thinks (wrongly, I say) that it can do as well without art as with; the other side can do best with the lower end of art. Neither want pictures as a thing of the soul or spirit. And, emphatically, the unspiritual side of art is not good. But please, Mr. Provost, go on. You know you had not done.

Provost. Now can't you make head, between you, against the well, the severe side of religion, and the-well, the dogmatic side of irreligion? Both of them denounce art and culture and everything else now. There are colleges started to bring boys up on nothing but mathematics and sciences.

Highcliffe. Lop-sided lot, I should say, the results will be.

Provost. I hope they won't make new discoveries in morals, as well as physics. But Professor Storks allows French and German to prevent 'lop-sidedness'-which is his word, by the way.

Charles. It will hardly do that, if the young physicists only read French and German about physics; and what else will there be to interest them?

May. But they are to learn drawing, and all that.

Charles. Utilitarian drawing; freehand, shading, perspective, and geometry; either for lecturing's sake, as a convenient language of expressive symbols, or with a view to carpet and wall-paper designs. That's for a help to the artizan, not a fine art, and they don't know they can't have original patterns without fine art.

May. I'm sorry to hear the words 'culture' and 'fine' already, because I'm sure somebody will have to try to tell us what they really mean; and Carry and I were agreeing how we detested them both.

But, Mr.

Caroline. I think 'fine' is the worst. Somehow they seem to me like fallen words, that meant good things once. Provost

Provost. We are not badly off the rails yet, my dear. I was meandering up towards the assertion that art and culture are on our religious, or theological, or orthodox side, as they were in the days of Pheidias and of Sandro Botticelli. Yes, Charles, I know Savonarola burnt some pictures in the bonfires of vanity; and so would you have

done; so you said they ought to do with some things in the Uffizii

now.

Charles. And with others much nearer home. But do go on, Provost; you are in accordance with Scripture, I hope, and very full of comfort at all events. I'll tell you afterwards about the letters I've got, and the No-Popery tracts, and idols portrayed on the wall, and inquiries how many souls I expect to save, or the contrary, by antiChristian dilettantism; and how far will perspective avail me in the day of final account? It really is formidable, you know. Opinion is opinion these people say I do them harm: they're not very wise, but they are people-they are-Christian donkies, I mean: and it's unpleasant working to their scandal. Can you really make anything of their reasons, Provost ?

Provost. I think what Cliffe and I have been talking of would reply well to them. That's what I was coming to when we went off the scent at where, my dear Caroline?

Caroline. I should say at Savonarola and the Bonfires of Vanity. Charles. Well done, good young lady she has it. Forra'd, Provost. Provost. Highcliffe, you go on for me. I don't like lecturing so much, and you're young and secular.

Highcliffe. What we came to before was this—that not only sacred art was naturally connected with, and good for teaching, Theology of Revealed Religion; but that naturalist Art, even to pure transcript of natural Beauty, was a part of the evidence and testimony of Natural Religion or Theism.

May and Caroline. O prove that for us!

Highcliffe. We came to this, via Mozley's 'Sermon on Nature,' and it struck me what masses of illustration there are to that, in very perfect language (and all based on personal observation, so as to be in a real sense scientific), in Modern Painters: enough to make a very strong case to anybody who will fairly consider the data. Then it struck me that many instances in Modern Painters, Vol. IV., where beauty is shown to result from physical contrivances for men's welfare, further connected the Theistic argument from Beauty with Paley's Theistic argument from Contrivance. And that connection I found dwelt on in Sir Edmund Beckett's small book. Paley's argument will hold water perfectly well; he's only wrong in his natural history now and then. There's a new edition, all posted up to present discoveries, and they make no difference whatever in the fact that nature and the earth have been prepared with purpose for the children of men; for their life and for their admiration.

May. And have you written us anything about that?

Highcliffe. We are at it now, and I think it ought to comfort your heart to contribute to the body of testimony which natural beauty really affords. Write that down in symbol, and he may run who reads. The sermon-argument is that God made all things beautiful in appeal

to man, as a Reason to a reason. The picture argument is that man sees the signs of such making, with his reason as well as his eyes, and to the delight of both. Art expresses that delight primarily. The Provost's writing us a paper about it all; or it may run to a number of them. But just now, till it's ready, I vote we analyse Charley and his troubles. Modern Painters is too big a book to have on the table with claret and coffee: we might have an afternoon over it in the shade here.

Charles. I can't spare a whole one now. But tell me why is science against culture, and religion against both, and all of them against my 'picters' in S. Vitus's Chapel Nobody says they aren't good work; and I get praise enough for Lethe, and the Last Faun, and the Nympholept, and all the half-heathen things.

Provost. We've fallen on a half-heathen world.

Charles. That may be ; but I thought the Christian part of it would like me better.

Provost. Well, you know, Art is claimed on both sides, and suspected on both sides, and when one side gets a hold on her, the other says she is worth nothing. It is just the same with culture, of which she forms a part. We used to say all true culture depended on religion, because that aimed highest for man, and gave him something to grow to. Now they've cut it off from that stem, and call for French sweetness and light; as if out of Heine had come sweetness, and SainteBeuve had first said, 'Let there be intellectual light.'

May and Caroline. We are in for culture now; do tell us what it is. Highcliffe. Culture means ploughing and sowing, and making to grow that which ought to grow, just as edification means building up. Only people are not quite agreed as to what ought to grow, or be built. May. That's what the word means; but somehow the word is not a nice one. Will you go on about the thing? Do you really like it or not? It seems to me-really-the best part of culture is mere charity, and good manners, and reticence.

Highcliffe. Quite so; and I quite agree that the sweetness, or moral part of it, is in fact Christian, here, among Christian people. But there is another part called light, or clearness, or the being accurately right as to facts; and first of all, exactly knowing what you know, and what you mean. That was the way in ancient Athens, and that is the real reason why they talk about Hellenic culture. It was not popular there because it enforced self-examination, because its professors were always saying rí λéyeɩs σó ;—what do you really mean?— do you understand what you are saying? That offended people sadly in those days.

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May. Well, I hope we're not to have Athens over again. I've heard it's in Mr. Mahaffy-that people's wives were not allowed any culture there; but were shut up indoors without any books. They say men only allowed education to-single persons.