'It is not to reveal my own private troubles,' says Mr. Holman Hunt at the close of the papers in which he tells the story of his struggle for life, 'that I relate these things; other English painters have had worse. It is to save future artists from the narrow-minded opposition which I had to stem at every fresh effort. . . . People may consider whether it was consistent with any profession of interest in the attainment by England of a glory in art (such as she deservedly has in other great pursuits) that a man who had produced the earlier work ("The Finding of the Saviour ") should have been left in the best years of his life, despite the fact of great diligence and carefulness, without means to continue his chosen task, except with vexatious interruptions, from sheer want of money. May I not ask whether our enemies are not now proved to have been wrong? Their violence proceeded either from my incompetence to deal with art, and that also of Rossetti and Millais to paint, or from the ignorance and injustice of our jury. Such unbounded condemnation on their part was either very right or very wrong. If Rossetti's "Annunciation was contemptible then, it cannot be worthy enough for the nation to purchase now. If Millais's "Isabella" was atrocious then, it is not fitting of a high place in the Liverpool Permanent Art Gallery. The company I was condemned with is admitted now to be of the highest order. Had we found a public showing only a reasonable amount of interest and independence of taste, and of faith that our countrymen could and should win glory for the nation, I know that my two companions would have done greater things than can easily be imagined, and I can assert that what I now show of my life's work would be but a tithe of what there would be; but even yet, I thank God, the day leaves me opportunity to work with my might.'

Sad words to be written by the man who painted the 'Light of the World' all the sadder because we are conscious of their truth.

The fact remains that Art is not an essential in the lives of most English men and women, and does not appeal to the people of England as a whole. And, since the national spirit is not in sympathy with it, the Victorian age has not produced an art that corresponds to its high degree of culture and civilization. M. Chesneau, for his part, considers that the uneducated state of public taste is at fault, and accounts for this by saying that the English soul has no ardent craving after the perfect expression of beauty.

'It seems to me as if a picture, to this nation, meant nothing more than a luxury, and as if a chef-d'œuvre-albeit considered a fine acquisition, as testifying to the worldly prosperity and distinction of the possessor-is powerless to produce the sensation of delight and elevation which might be looked for in the contemplation of a great work. This has been during a century the condition of art in England. And this explains the desire among purchasers to obtain

productions which display singularity rather than simple beauty. Since they only wish to procure an object for amusement, they strive, with method in their madness, to light on what is extraordinary and out of the way' (p. 162).

There is, it must be confessed, a good deal of truth in this remark of the French critic. For year by year we see how the pictures which attract the most public notice are those which are distinguished by some sensational feature, some trick in the lighting, some startling effect or novel arrangement; and so the successful artist is encouraged to indulge in the perpetual repetition of the particular device which first caught the popular fancy, instead of seeking after higher ideals and a more perfect realization of their conceptions. 'Art as a whole does not progress.' This, too, is the conclusion at which Mr. Armstrong arrives when he has reviewed the fine art of the Victorian age; and he ends by warning us against the fallacy of thinking that a finer technique necessarily implies a finer art.

'Wilkie said acutely of French painting, when he saw it in Paris in 1814, that it was the result, and not the cause, of encouragement; and in all our hopes for art in England, in all our straining of the eyes to descry the advent of new genius upon our home horizons, we should guard against the mistake of accepting the means for the end, science for art, and ability to realize with the fingers for the faculty which conceives' (p. 176).

The advice is well timed and salutary, and will be remembered, we hope, as much by our critics as by our painters. On the other hand, there is no doubt that, as Mr. Armstrong also observes, Art is more alive in England than it was at the Queen's Accession, and an enormously larger number of people have right ideas about it than they had then' (p. 176). To spread these right ideas among all classes and grades of peopleamong our statesmen and our thinkers, our patrons of art and buyers of pictures, our working men and women in every rank of life-must be the earnest and unceasing aim of all lovers of art. In order to attain this end it is necessary, not only that high-class art literature should be widely spread abroad, but that every opportunity should be taken of setting great works of art before the public.

'Every means of stimulating, cultivating, and popularizing the noblest expressions of art,' said Mr. Watts, when he was examined four-and-twenty years ago before the Royal Commission of Enquiry into the position of the Royal Academy, 'should be pressed into service. Until the people at large grow to care about it it can

never take root in England, and this they can never do until it shall be presented to them habitually; but a people who care more for Handel's music than that of any other composer would not long be insensible to similar impressions conveyed in a different but very analogous form. . . . For public improvement it is necessary that works of sterling but simple excellence should be scattered abroad as widely as possible. At present the public never see anything beautiful except in exhibition rooms, when the novelty of sight-seeing naturally disturbs the intellectual perceptions. Ás I believe the love of beauty to be inherent in the human mind, there must be some unfortunate influence at work; to counteract this should be the object of a fine-art institution, and I feel assured, if really good things were scattered among the people, it would not be long before satisfactory results exhibited themselves.'

In proportion as 'right ideas' gain ground, and the public mind is educated to a proper understanding and appreciation of art, the sympathy of the people will be enlisted, our painters will receive the encouragement they need, and thus, stimulated to higher efforts, will 'represent worthily things. worthy to be represented.' So we may yet live to see that Art Renaissance which a recent American writer has assured us is about to dawn on the world, a Renaissance worthy of the advanced state of civilization we have reached, higher and nobler than any that has gone before. Of that Renaissance which is yet to come we shall then recognize the germ and beginning in the Fine Art of the Victorian age.

ART. X.-FIFTY YEARS OF DOCUMENTARY DISCOVERIES ON CHURCH HISTORY.

Urkundenfunde zur Geschichte des christlichen Alterthums. Von Dr. GOTTHARD VICTOR LECHLER, ord. Professor der Theologie, Geh. Kirchenrath in Leipzig. (Leipzig, 1886.)

THE celebration of the Queen's Jubilee has given occasion for the publication of many reviews of the progress the nation has made during the last fifty years. It seems, then, not an unsuitable time to take a review of what the last fifty years have gained for us of materials for the knowledge of Church history; for in respect of the coming to light of new documents, the years of our Queen's reign will well bear com

parison with any previous period of equal length. So many important 'finds' have been made, that we cannot help asking ourselves whether we have come to the end of them. Is there any chance that any of the works now set down as lost may yet be recovered? What a light it would throw on the history of our Gospels if there should be disinterred from the library of some Eastern monastery that Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord by Papias, about which so much ingenuity of conjecture has been expended! What if a copy should have escaped destruction of Porphyry's learned assault on the Christian faith, a work so hateful to believers that they seem not to have had even patience to read the answers to it—at least these answers, though some of them were written by distinguished men, have failed to reach us—and yet a work which, if we now had it, would probably give us a fuller picture of the Christianity of the third century than is presented in the writings of many an orthodox divine? What if some New Testament MS. should come to light earlier than any we have got, the earliest of which only dates from the fourth century?

It seems unreasonable to hope for much of new discovery, now that the treasures of the civilized parts of the world have been so well explored. The records of the earliest Christian centuries, to which we should now attach the most value, did not excite the same interest in the minds of the scribes of the Middle Ages, who preferred to transcribe many documents which we could bear to lose with little grief. Our hopes of finding really old books or papers still surviving become faint when we read many a true story of the destruction of ancient libraries through the waste of ignorant possessors, who either allowed valuable papers to rot uncared for, or even applied them to base uses. According to Tischendorf's story, he was barely in time to save the Sinaitic MS. of the New Testament from being used in lighting fires. The regions whose literary treasures have been least explored are also those where waste and destruction are likely to have had greatest range of exercise. Every year the chance of finding old documents undestroyed must be becoming less; and if we should find a heap of such, the chances are that the greater part would be things for which we should not much care. Lord Bacon complained that time was like a river, which bore on its surface things light and worthless, while the weighty matter sank to the bottom. Yet if we must not be too sanguine in our hopes, the knowledge of what the last fifty years have gained for us may teach us not to despair. For at the time when Queen Victoria ascended the throne it might have

been argued, as we have argued now, that there was little reason to anticipate much addition to the then existing sources of knowledge.

There will no doubt be many readers of this Review for whom nothing that we have to tell will have any novelty; but there is a pleasure in being reminded of what we know, as well as in being told what we do not know. We called to mind at the beginning of this article how many narratives of the secular events of the reign have been lately published, and have been read with interest by persons themselves well able to remember most of the things related. The tract by Dr. Lechler, which is the subject of this article, is intended to give an account of the documents throwing light on early Church history which have been recovered within the last fifty years; and though naturally he wrote last year without thought of our Jubilee, it so happens that he begins with the first year of our Sovereign's reign. Although we can ourselves well remember the surprise and pleasure with which we heard of most of the discoveries of which he tells, we read his tract with so much interest that we think our readers will be glad to receive an account of this very opportune publication. A review article in modern times is commonly an independent dissertation, for which the title of the book reviewed only furnishes a motto. Ours must be one of the modest reviews of the old school, which aimed at no more than giving a faithful account of the contents of the work reported on; for we write in an Alpine village, at a distance from books, and have learned by sad experience the danger of putting too much confidence in our memory.

Dr. Lechler begins by stating the limitations necessary in order to bring what he has to tell within reasonable compass. Thus he restricts himself to discoveries throwing light on the history of the first six centuries, although he gives specimens of interesting things which might be related if he were to carry the history lower down. He confines himself also to speaking of documents. Thus he refrains, for example, from saying anything about the explorations made in the Roman catacombs, about the discovery of ancient buildings, and about inscriptions. This last subject is in itself extensive enough to furnish materials for an article. Those who have read Bishop Lightfoot's recent volumes will know how important a part inscriptions play both in determining the date of Polycarp's martyrdom and in enabling us to identify the Asiarch who presided over the games at which he suffered. Many still disputed questions in chronology might be settled