tolerable correctness. We are earnest to make this protest against the chronological scheme, and we hope it will be dissipated by the general voice, because Mr Dyce’s pamphlet seems to have found favour in the eyes of the commissioners. They almost adopt his language—or at least, with little variation of phrase, his argument, and his illustration. They too speak of an “intelligent public,” which has no existence as to art, and is but the translation of Mr Dyce’s Latin quotation, “docti artis rationem intelligunt.” With him, they snub the admirers of “Raffaelle, Titian, and Correggio,” and adopt his literary illustration, and a very bad illustration it is, for the rubbish of books in the world is even greater in bulk than the picture rubbish. Some of the book rubbish may indeed bear affinity to art, and come within the scope of the scheme’s arrangement. The woodcuts of our earliest spelling-books, of Jack the Giant-killer, of Pilgrim’s Progress, and the “specimens” heading last dying speeches and confessions, may yet be discovered with some pains, and no very large cost, if a Parliamentary commission would bespeak Mr Dyce’s acceptable labours. How gratifying to such collectors would it be to trace the rise and progress of that particular branch of the art now so much in fashion, from the earliest “specimens” of designs in popular editions of Æsop’s Fables, to Mr Landseer’s last costly print. Nor should the old glazed picture tiles, that used to amuse our early childhood, when the glow of fire-light illuminated the “animali parlanti,” warmed our young affections, and heated our incipient imaginings, be omitted. The “intelligent public” might perhaps hence learn not only a little in the history of art and its progress, but somewhat also of the history and progress of cruelty, when they see how much artistic labour has been bestowed, and what a large price is given, in our modern improvement days, in getting up and in the sale of that “perfect specimen,” Mr Landseer’s “Otter Hunt,” where the poor creature is writhing upon the spear of the huntsman, and the howling brute dogs are in sympathetic delight with the human bigger brute than themselves. It will be then not uncreditable if the “intelligent public” retrograde in their taste, and for once agree with Mr Dyce in rather admiring the attenuated and ill-drawn deformities, which, after all that can be said against them, were a less libel upon man and brute than some later and more perfect “specimens.” To this extent the chronological idea must go for completion, for Mr Dyce, the favourite of connoisseurs and dilettanti, will not allow them to stop short of it. “Notwithstanding appearances,” he says, “I do not imagine the trustees of the National Gallery ever seriously contemplated the establishment of an _index expurgatorius_ of pictures.” Such opinions he considers obsolete. We must have all “specimens,” however bad; for he says, in emphatic