the harp of Orpheus was not more charming."

The idea that "laborious" study is necessary is not the view instilled into the audience at these popular lectures.

They are deluded into the idea "that they know all about it," and that they have grasped the subject so completely, there is no further need of study; whereas their insight into the subject must be of a very superficial and cursory kind, and yet they are led to consider themselves fully capable of passing their opinion on the subject. This of necessity fosters pride and ignorance, and also leads to false criticism, and to that superficial frothy knowledge which passes away almost as soon as it is acquired. To know and to remember permanently one must grapple with and study a subject. There is no royal road" to learning now, any more than there was when Ptolemy gave utterance to that well known assertion.

To pass opinions on people or things more is required than this evanescent acquaintance with the subject. As the physical and muscular part of our being needs constant and diligent exercise to develop its powers and keep the body in a healthy condition, so with the mental and moral part of our being. That this exercise of our physical nature can be done by a deputy, while we sit by and passively enjoy the fruits of his diligent efforts, fondly imagining that we will be the better of it, no one could possibly think. It must be the same with the other parts of our complex being. We must ourselves bring out our various powers by earnest thought and diligent study, if we would attain to any mental or moral strength.

It is a great fallacy to suppose that every one has the right and power to criticize. This cannot be

claimed except by an educated and cultivated mind.

There seems to be an absence now of special pleaders on any subject; all appear to have vanished, or rather to have raised themselves to the Bench, from that passing judg ments which are false and unworthy of the name of judgment, which implies an opinion formed upon a knowledge of the subject, in all its bearings.

How few of these latter-day criticisms are worthy of the name? We assert that this critical faculty cannot and ought not to be exercised except by those whose whole nature has been cultivated, because, besides the mental training needed to weigh evidence and form a true judgment, the imagination must be likewise cultivated, so that the whole circumstances and meaning of the subject may be entered into to know "how far its modes and figures of representation are merely vehicles of inner truth, or are the essence of the truth itself; to understand the human conditions of the writers, and appreciate how far these may have influenced their statements to give to past theological language its proper weight; to trace the history of its terms, so as not to confound human thought with Divine faith."

There must be this blending together of knowledge and imagination. As has been well said, "Celui qui a de l'imagination sans érudition a des ailes et n'a pas de pieds."

Subjects must be viewed as a whole not in bits. There is the "subjective" as well as the "objective" side to every truth. Man before the spirit was breathed into him by the Great One Cause of all was incomplete.

In our perfect humanity there must be a hidden life as well as an outward form. Does not the whole of nature teach this truth-" Things are not what they seem ?"

Just in the proportion as this cultivated imagination is present or absent, will Art improve or decline in all that constitutes good, high artistic taste? The power to discriminate between false and true taste is only held by those who possess the cultivated gift of sympathy, that power of entering into and sympathizing, so to speak, with the subject in its inner life, as well as understanding its outward expression or form. The inability to do this is the reason that among the innumerable copies of the grand old masters, so few are worthy of the time and money spent upon them. The popular idea is that accuracy of drawing, facility in using the brush, joined to an eye for colouring, are all that is needed to make a good copyist. This is far removed from the truth "He best can paint who shall feel them most.'

Take one example. How almost impossible it is to procure a good copy of that inexpressibly sad and beautiful picture by Guido of the "Cenci." Simply because its whole power, the life-essence of the picture consists, not in its beautiful features, but in its expression. Guido has immortalized himself by the skill with which he has portrayed her story in her expression. To copy it and convey the painter's idea, it requires that the copyist should enter into his idea, sympathize with him, and also into the story of her life in its almost unfathomable depth of sorrow.

It is

one of the saddest stories which have ever stained our humanity. Without the possession of this gift no one can ever aspire to be a good copyist. No faithful, real copy can be made unless the cultivated imagination and sympathetic nature are there, which alone will enable the copyist to enter into and feel the indefinable spiritual charm which really constitutes the life of the picture.

So in poetry, the true poet must bring forth from nature more than meets the ordinary eye or ear, he must invest it with a spiritual life; if he would bring before us a picture that shall delight and interest us of the inanimate world, he must pour over it traditions, legends, superstitions, connecting it with man; in other words must clothe it with human sympathies.

The power that music has ever had over the human mind arises from the fact that it expresses the imaginative and spiritual part of our nature, which we possess, be it dormant or otherwise, and which we cannot put into words; but this untranslatable musical language brightens up and penetrates our heart and soul. Let us strike out of our educational code all these artistic, and perhaps unremunerative, tastes-and where shall we be? -bound in by the narrow and narrowing world of sense. In the words of one of the greatest and most thoughtful, as well as most popular, writers of our day-"How incomplete the grand nature of man must be, if you struck out of his reason the comprehension of poetry and music and religion? In each are reached, and are sounded depths in his reason, otherwise concealed from himself. History, Knowledge, Science, stop at the point in which mystery begins. There they meet with the world of shadow. Not an inch of that world can they penetrate without the aid of poetry and religion, two necessities of intellectual man much more nearly allied than he votaries of the practical and the positive suppose. To the aid and elevation of both those necessities comes in music, and there has never existed a religion in the world which has not demanded music as its ally."

This necessity of cultivating the imagination holds good also in the

physical sciences-strange as it may sound and appear at first-but what does Sir David Brewster say?"The influence of the imagination as an instrument of research has we think been much overlooked by those who have ventured to give laws to philosophy. This faculty is of the greatest value in physical enquiries. If we use it as a guide and confide to its indications, it will infallibly deceive us, but if we employ it as an auxiliary it will afford us the most invaluable aid." That there must be some fundamental change in the present ideas of what real education is, would seem essential if we are to progress towards moral, mental, and even physical health as a nation. That education, true education, must deal with man in all the complexity of his being, elevating his

tastes and his spiritual nature to the highest idea of perfection, which Archbishop Leighton well describes as the union with a higher good by love, and that alone is endless perfection. That this education and cultivation of the imagination is only necessary for the higher classes is a sad and grievous mistake. There is no condition in life from which it should be excluded. It would even seem more essential to give this counteracting influence to those who are obliged daily to live and work under circumstances which absolutely tend to grossness of mind and taste. Not to remember this, is to ignore that higher part of our nature, the spiritual, which, is the inheritance and birthright alike of the peer and the peasant.

66

66

THERE is a saying as old as the venerable hills, that "One half of the world knows not how the other half lives." We know, or at least we suppose, that as we eat, drink, and sleep, so also do millions of other people; there are some odd thousands, it is true, who have not anything to eat or drink, and whose lodging is on the cold ground, and yet they too manage to keep alive somehow. It is notorious that the dwellers in large towns live more isolated lives than the dwellers in the country; in our street," our "terrace," our crescent" in London we see in No. 20, next door, or over the way, the blinds drawn up as usual to-day, and a due appearance of life going on within; tomorrow, perhaps, the blinds are all down, the signs of life have disappeared, and we make idle and uninterested speculations about what has happened; it may be illness, it may be death; we don't care. How can it affect us if the wife of Brown's bosom has been suddenly snatched therefrom to, let us hope, what Mrs. Gamp would call, a "brighter spear." We have not time to mourn with Brown, and, were it not so, Brown would probably resent our mourning as impertinent.

Not very long ago there was a good deal of lamentation upon the disappearance from amongst us of that fine old character, Leisure. No one now seems to have time to do anything except- yes, there is one thing to which the majority of us devote a large portion of our

time, viz., grumbling! We grumble at the weather, we grumble if our morning paper is late, we grumble when it comes because there is no news in it, we grumble at our bills when they come in, we grumble if they have not been sent, when by some strange fatality we were able and willing to pay! We grumble at ourselves for grumbling and at our friends who do, or do not, sympathise with our grumbles; we grumble at life for being a bore, and yet we all want to be old.

There is also a fair share of time spent in what we may call buttoning and unbuttoning! Was it not a Frenchman who, some years ago, committed suicide because he could no longer endure the trouble of putting on and taking off his clothes? To have to do so is a bore most decidedly, but, happily, few of us are mad enough to give up life rather than tie strings.

We often try to picture to ourselves how Adam and Eve felt when they were obliged to fasten on their wild beast skins every morning; but, after all, a skin was a skin and nothing more; there were no petticoats and flounces to vex the soul of Eve, no shirt collars and braces to make Adam swear, no glove buttons to fly off at the exact moment that they ought to have been fixed as fate; and that moment is, generally, when we are starting for our parish church after a late breakfast, and when the cracked bell is already going, as some one has said, "Tim Dowler, Tim Dowler" in our ears. But the old remark, that one half