tiful ballad, called 'Barclay of Ury.'" We have a distinct recollection of having read that ballad some years ago, and of our impression that it was incomparably the worst which we ever encountered; though, if a naked sword were at this moment to be presented to our throat, we could depone nothing further, than that "rising in a fury,' rhymed to "Barclay of Ury ;" and also, that "frowning very darkly," chimed in to the name of "Barclay." But it was woeful stuff; and it lingers in our memory solely by reason of its absurdity. However, as Mrs Stowe prefers this sort of thing to Spenser, we have nothing for it except to make our bow, regretting that our æsthetical notions are so far apart, that, under no circumstances whatever, can we foresee the possibility of a coalition.

Beyond the Channel we shall not follow her; the more especially as the greater part of the Continental tour is described in the journal of the Rev. Charles Beecher, an individual with whose proceedings, thoughts, and raptures, we have not been able to conjure up the slightest sympathy. In fact, taking Mr Beecher at his own estimate and valuation, and making every allowance for playfulness of

manner, we should by no means covet his company in any part of Europe; and we are only surprised that, in one ortwo places (as for instance Cologne), he did not receive an emphatic check to his outrageous hilarity. But as he seems to have been impressed with the idea that he exhibited himself rather in a humorous and attractive light, we have no intention of dispelling the dream-we are only sorry that Mrs Stowe should have thought it worth while to increase the bulk of her book by admitting her relative's inflated, ill-written, and singularly silly lucubrations, as part of a work which, considering her literary celebrity, and the interest of the theme, will in all probability have an extensive circulation.

After making every allowance for the difficulty attendant upon the task of portraying with fidelity and spirit the customs of a foreign country, we cannot, with truth, express an opinion that Mrs Stowe has been successful in her effort. Far more interesting and agreeable volumes have been written by women of less natural ability; and we are constrained to dismiss, with a feeling of decided disappointment, a book which we opened with the anticipation of a very different result.

It is the common practice of innovators to set up a loud cry against long-received opinions which favour them not, and the word prejudice is the denunciation of "mad-dog." But prejudices, like human beings who hold them, are not always "so bad as they seem." They are often the action of good, natural instincts, and often the results of ratiocinations whose processes are forgotten. Let us have no 66 Apology" for a longestablished prejudice; ten to one but it can stand upon its own legs, and needs no officious supporter, who simply apologises for it.

We have had philosophers who have told us there is really no such thing as beauty, consequently there can be

no such thing as taste; that it is a mere idea, an unaccountable prejudice somehow or other engendered in the brain. And though there exists not a head in the universe without a portion of this disorder-breeding brain, the philosopher persists that the product is a worthless nonentity, and altogether out of the nature of things. We maintain, however, in favour of prejudices and tastes-that there are real grounds for both; and, presuming not to be so wise as to deny the evidences of our senses, and conclusions of our minds, think it scarcely worth while to unravel the threads of our convictions. In matters of science we marvel and can believe almost anything; but in our tastes and feel

ings we naturally, and by an undoubting instinct, shrink from the touch of an innovator, as we would shun the heel of a donkey. Whenever an innovator of this kind sets up "An Apology" for his intended folly, we invariably feel that he means a very audacious insult upon our best perceptions. The worst of it is, he is not one easily put aside -he will labour to get a commission into your house, ransack it to its sewers, and turn it out of windows. He is the man that must ever be doing. He will think himself entitled to perambulate the world with his pot of polychrome in his hand, and bedaub every man's door-post; and if multitudes-the whole offended neighbourhood-rush out to upset his pot and brush, he will laugh in their faces, defend his plastering instruments, and throw to them with an air his circular, "An Apology ;" and perhaps afterwards knock the doors down for an authorised payment. Such a one shall get no "Apology"-pence out of us.

We are prejudiced-we delight in being prejudiced-will continue prejudiced as long as we live, and will entertain none but prejudiced friends. There are things we will believe, and give no reasons for, ever; and things we never will believe, whatever reasons are to be given in their favour. We think the man who said, "Of course, I believe it, if you say you saw it; but I would not believe it if I saw it myself," used an irresistible argument of good sound prejudice, mixed with discretion. It is better, safer, and honester, to bristle up like a hedgehog, and let him touch who dares, than to sit and be smoothed and smoothed over with oily handling of sophisticated arguments, till every decent palpable roughness of reason is taken from you.

Reader, do you like white marble? What a question! you will ask,-do you suppose me to have no eyes? Do not all people covet it-import it from Carrara? Do not sculptors, as sculptors have done in all ages, make

statues from it-monuments, ornaments, and costly floors? Of course, everybody loves white marble. Then, reader, if such is your taste, you are a prejudiced ignoramus; you belong to that age devoid of the capacity to appreciate and the power to execute works of art"-that age which certain persons profess to illuminate. You are now, under the new dictators of taste, to know that you had no business to admire white marble,*—that you are so steeped in this old prejudice that it will require a long time before you can eradicate this stain of a vile admiration, although your teachers have acquired a true knowledge in an incredible time. You must put yourself under the great colourman of the great Crystal Palace, Mr Owen Jones, who, if he does not put out your eyes in the experiments he will set before you, will at least endeavour to convince you that you are a fool of the first water. But beware how you don his livery of motley. Hear him: "Under this influence (the admiration of white marble), however, we have been born and bred, and it requires time to shake off the trammels which such early education leaves." You have sillily believed that the Athenians built with marble because of its beauty, that the Egyptians thought there was beauty in granite. You thought in your historical dream that he who found the city of brick, and left it of marble, had done something whereof he might reasonably boast. You have been egregiously mistaken, If you ever read that the Greeks and Romans, and other people since their times civilised, sent great distances for marble for their palaces and statues, you must put it down in your note-book of new "historic doubts." You learn a fact you never dreamed of, from Mr Owen Jones. They merely used it (marble) because 'it lay accidentally at their feet. He puts the richest colouring of his contempt on "the artificial value which white marble has in our eyes." Learn the real cause of its use: "The Athenians

built with marble, because they found it almost beneath their feet, and also from the same cause which led the Egyptians to employ granite, which was afterwards painted-viz.because it was the most enduring, and capable of receiving a higher finish of workmanship." He maintains that so utterly regardless were these Greeks of any supposed beauty in marble-especially white marble-that they took pains to hide every appearance of its texture; that they not only painted it all over, but covered it with a coating of stucco. Listen to an oracle that, we will answer for it, never came from Delphi, that no Pythia in her madness ever conceived, and that, if uttered in the recesses, would have made Apollo shake his temple to pieces.

"To what extent were white marble temples painted and ornamented? I would maintain that they were entirely so; that neither the colour of the marble, nor even its surface, was preserved; and that preparatory to the ornamenting and colouring of the surface, the whole was covered with a thin coating of stucco, something in the nature of a gilder's ground, to stop the absorption of the colours by the marble."

"A thin coat of stucco!," and no exception with respect to statues-to be applied wherever the offensive white marble showed its unblushing nakedness and beauty!! Let us imagine it tested on a new statue-thus stucco over, however thin, Mr Bayley's Eve, or Mr Power's Greek Slave -the thought is enough to make the sculptor go mad, and commit a murder on himself or the plasterer-to see all his fine, his delicate chisellings obliterated! all the nice markings, the scarcely perceptible dimplings gone!-for let the coat of stucco be thin as a wafer, it must, according to that thickness, enlarge every rising and diminish the spaces between them: thus, all true proportion must be lost; between two risings the space must be less. "What fine chisel," says our immortal Shakespeare, "could ever yet cut breath?" How did he imagine, in these few words, the living motion of the "breath of life" in the statue! and who doubts either the attempt or the suc

cess so to represent perfect humanity, when he looks at the finest antique statues? Let an audacious innovator dare to daub one of them with his coat of stucco, and all the chiselling of the life, breath, and motion is annihilated. It must be so, whatever be the thickness of the coat; though it be but a nail-paring it must diminish risings and hollows, and all nicer touches must disappear. We should heartily desire to see the innovator suffocated in his plaster and paint-pot, that in his suffering he may know it is a serious thing to knock the life-breath out of the body even of a statue.

"Nec lex est justior ulla Quam necis artifices arte perire suâ."

There is one slight objection to our getting rid of this prejudice in favour of white marble which we suggest to Mr Owen Jones, and all the "Stainers' " Company-the unseemly blots we shall have to make in the fairest pages of poetry, old and new. Albums will of course be ruined, and a general smear, bad as a "coat of stucco," be passed over the whole books of beauties who have "dreamed they dwelt in marble halls." The new professors, polychromatists, must bring out, if they are able, new editions of all our classics. How must this passage from Horace provoke their bile:

"Urit me Glycone nitor

Splendentis Pario marmore puriùs."

And when, after being enchanted by the "grata protervitas," he adds the untranslateable line,

"Et Vultus nimium lubricus aspici,"

we can almost believe, with that bad taste which Mr Owen Jones will condemn, that he had in the full eye of his admiration the polished, delicately defined charm of the Parian marble.

It was a clown's taste to daub the purity; and first he daubed his own face, and the faces of his drunken rabble. He would have his gods made as vulgar as himself; and then, doubtless, there was many a wooden, worthless, and obscene idol, the half joke and veneration of the senseless clowns, painted as fine as vermilion could make them.

"Agricola et minio suffusus, Bacche, rubente,

Primus inexpertâ duxit ab arte choros."
TIB.

But to suppose that Praxiteles and Phidias could endure to submit their loveliest works to be stuccoed and solidly painted over with vermilion, seems to us to suppose a perfect impossibility. That they could not have willingly allowed the defilement we have shown by the nature of their work, all the nicety of touch and real proportion of parts lying under the necessity of alteration, and consequently damage thereby. Whatever apparent proof might be adduced that such statues were painted-and we doubt the proof, as we will endeavour to show we do not hesitate to say that the daubings and plasterings must have been the doing of a subsequent less cultivated people, and possibly at the demand of a vulgarised mobocracy. The clown at our pantomimes is the successor to the clown who smeared his face with wine-lees, and passed his jokes while he gave orders to have his idol painted with vermilion. Yet though it must be impossible that Phidias or Praxiteles would have allowed solid coats of paint or stucco, or both, to have ruined the works of their love and genius, under the presuming title "historical evidence an anecdote is culled from the amusing gossip Pliny, to show what Praxiteles thought of it. "There is a passage in Pliny which is decisive, as soon as we understand the allusion. Speaking of Nicias (lib. xxxv. cap. 11), he says that Praxiteles, when asked which of his marble works best satisfied him, replied, "Those which Nicias has bad under his hands." "So much," adds Pliny, "did he prize the finishing of Nicias" (tantum circumlitioniejus tribuebat). This "finishing of Nicias," by its location, professes to be a translation from Pliny, which it is not. Had the writer adopted the exact wording of the old English translation, from which he seems to have taken the former portion of the sentence, it would not have suited his purpose, but it would have been more fair: it is thus, "So much did he attribute unto his vernish and polishing "

which contradicts the solid painting. Pliny is rather ambiguous with regard to this Nicias-whether he was the celebrated one or no. But it should be noticed that the anecdote, as told in Mr Owen Jones' "Apology," is intended to show that the painter's skill, as a painter, was added—substantially added to the work of Praxiteles, whereas this Nicias may have been one who was nice in the making and careful in the use of his varnish; and we readily grant that some kind of varnishing or polishing may have been used over the statues, both for lustre and protection. Certainly at one time, though we would not say there is proof as to the time of Phidias, such varnishes, or rather waxings, were in use. But even if it were the celebrated Nicias to whom the anecdote refers, we cannot for a moment believe he would have touched substantially, as a painter, any work of Praxiteles. But as genius is ever attached to genius, he may have supplied to Praxiteles the means of giving that polish which he gave to his own works, and probably aided him in the operation, not "had under his hands," as translated" quibus manum admovisset." Pliny had in his eye the very modus operandi of the encaustic process, the holding heated iron within a certain distance of the object. But what was the operation? Does the text authorise anything like the painting the statue? Certainly not. And however triumphantly it is brought forward, there is a hitch in the argument which must be confessed.

In making this confession, it would have been as well to have referred to Pliny himself for the meaning. Pliny uses the verb illinebat, in grammatical relation to circumlitio, in the sense of varnishing, in that well-known passage in which he speaks of the varnish used by Apelles-" Unum imitari nemo potuit, quod absoluta opera illinebat atramento ita tenui," &c.

The meaning of this passage hangs on the word circumlitio. Winckelmann follows the mass of commentators in understanding this as referring to some mode of polishing the statues. "But Quatremère de Quincey, in his

magnificent work Le Jupiter Olympien, satisfactorily shows this to be untenable, not only "because no sculptor could think of preferring such of his statues as had been better polished, but also because Nicias being a painter, not a sculptor, his services must have been those of a painter." If these are the only "becauses" of Quatremère de Quincey, they are anything but satisfactory; for a sculptor may esteem all his works as equal, and then prefer such as had the advantage of Nicias's circumlitio. Nor does the because of Nicias being a painter at all define the circumlitio to be a plastering with stucco, or a thick daubing with vermilion; for, be it borne in mind, this vermilion painting is always spoken of as a solid coating. As to Nicias's services, "What were they?" asks the author of the Historical Evidence

:

in Mr Jones's Apology. "Nicias was an encaustic painter, and hence it is clear that his circumlitio, his mode of finishing the statues, so highly prized by Praxiteles, must have been the application of encaustic painting to those parts which the sculptor wished to have ornamented. For it is quite idle to suppose a sculptor like Praxiteles would allow another sculptor to finish his works. The rough work may be done by other hands, but the finishing is always left to the artist. The statue completed, there still remained the painter's art to be employed, and for that Nicias is renowned."-Indeed! This is exceedingly childish first the truism that one sculptor would not have another to finish his work-of course, not; and then that the work was not finished until the painter had regularly, according to his best skill and art —which art and skill were required been employed in the painting it as he would paint a picture, "for which he was renowned;"—that is, variously colour all the parts till he had variously coloured hair and eyes, and put in varieties of flesh tones, show the blue veins beneath, and all that a painter renowned for these things was in the habit of doing in his pictures. If this be not the meaning of this author, and the object of Mr Owen Jones in making such a parade

of it, he or the writer writes without any fixed ideas, and all this assumption, all this absurd theory, is after all built upon a word which these people are determined to misunderstand, and yet upon which they cannot help but express the doubt. But why should there be any doubt at all? As far as we can see, the word is a plain word, and explains itself very well, and even expresses its modus operandi. A writer acquainted with such a schoolboy book as Ainsworth's Dictionary might have relieved his mind as to any doubts or forced construction of circumlitio; he might have found there, that the word comes from Lino, to smear, from Leo, the same-and that Circum in the composition shows the action, the mode of smearing. Nay, he is referred to two passages in Pliny, the very one from which the quotation in the Historical Evidence is taken, and to another in the same author, Pliny-and authors generally explain themselves-where the word is used in reference to the application of medicinal unguents. We can readily grant that the ancient sculptors did employ recipes of the most skilful persons in making unctuous varnishes, which they rubbed into the marble as a preservative, and also to bring out more perfectly the beauty of the marble texture-not altogether to hide it. It may be, without the least concession towards Mr Owen Jones's painting theory, as readily granted that they gave this unctuous composition a warm tone, with a little vermilion, as many still do to their varnishes. Pliny himself, in his 33d book, chap. vii., gives such a recipe White Punic wax, melted with oil, and laid on hot; the work afterwards to be well rubbed over with cere-cloths. To return to the "Circumlitio," we have the word, only with super instead of circum, used in the application of a varnish by the Monk Theophilus, of the tenth century, who, if he did not take the word from Pliny, and therefore in Pliny's sense, may be taken for quite as good Latin authority. After describing the method of making a varnish of oil and a gum-" gummi quod vocatur fornis" he adds, "Hoc glutine omnis pictura superlinita, fit et decora ac