establishing the fine arts in our universities, and at one time entertained a hope that the Taylor Legacy would have taken this direction. We are not, however, sorry altogether that it did not do so, for it would surely be more advantageous that such a movement should begin with the Government. It would remedy, too, more evils than one; it would give an occupation of mind, congenial with their academic studies, to our youth, and preserve them from a dangerous extravagance both of purse and of opinions. The hopes, however, of any thing really advantageous to the fine arts arising from our Government, unless very strongly urged to it, are small. They do not seem inclined at all to favour the profession; they would look upon it as solely addicted to the labour of the hand with a view to small profits--a portion of which profits, too, upon some strange principles of the political economists, they would appropriate to the nation as a fine, the penalty of genius. One would imagine, from the proposition of the Board of Trade to take 10 per cent from subscriptions to art-unions for the purchasing pictures for the National Gallery, that they considered the epithet "fine" so appropriated to the arts as intended originally to suggest a tax. They would not allow the profession a free trade. Whatever is obtained by exhibiting works of artists, should be as much their property as would the product of any other manufacture be the property of the respective adventurers, and the art-union subscriptions are undoubtedly a portion of these profits. What, in common justice, have the public to do with them? The proposed scheme is a step towards communism, and may have been borrowed from the French provisional seizure of their railroads. With equal justice might they require that every butcher and baker and tailor should give a portion of his meat, his bread, and his cloth to feed and clothe our army and navy; and this not as of a common taxation, but as an extra compliment and advantage to these trades. There is a great deal too much here of the beggarly utilitarian view. We advocate not the cause of art-unions--we think them perfectly mischievous, and would gladly see them suppressed; but surely to invite and tempt the poor artists to paint their twenty and five-and-twenty pound pictures, and coolly to take 10 per cent out of their pockets to purchase to yourself a gallery of art, is not very consonant to our general ideas of what is due to the liberal arts. The liberality is certainly not reciprocal.