exist alone, never for itself," never except as "representing a true"--defined as actually-existing--"thing or decorating a useful thing;" when he declares that every attempt by the imagination to "exalt or refine healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it." Mr. Ruskin bade men "go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, _rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing_;" and Mr. Hamerton was literally obeying him when he exiled himself for five years in a hut on an island in a bleak Scotch lake to learn faithfully to portray the shores of that single lake. Was it thus that Titian studied in his youth, and learned how, years after in Venice, to paint the chestnuts and the hills of Cadore a thousand-fold more artistically and more truly, because more abstractly and more ideally, than could all the "pre-Raphaelite" copyists of to-day? Thus we see the two extremes of Mr. Ruskin's teaching--see him at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of art, at another degrading art into the servilest copying. Observers may disagree as to whether these cognate things--self-consciousness in the artist, aesthetic philosophizing in the critic, and the taste for a literary rather than a pictorial value in the public--are on the increase or on the decrease in the various centres of art. Annual exhibitions--a significant illustration of our high-pressure life in art as in other things--would seem to tend toward deepening these faults. Attention must be attracted at all hazards, and the greater the number of exhibitors and the average attractiveness of their canvases the greater becomes the temptation to shine, not by excellence, but by eccentricities of treatment, or, still more, by the factitious interest of a "telling" subject. Is it due, perhaps, to this constant desire for notoriety on the part of the artist, and for more and more excitement on the part of the public, that in all modern schools, landscape art, as less possibly influenced by such a state of things, stands ahead of the art which has humanity for its subject? It is scarcely possible to find in France to-day a figure-painter who is a Daubigny, still less a Jules Dupre. Next to these unquestionably stand such animal-painters as Bonheur and Troyon; and it would be hard among the youngest file of artists to find a figure-painter who in his line should rival Van Marcke in his. In England also landscape ranks ahead, and it is perhaps in comparing it with French landscape that the difference between the schools is most truly though not most glaringly displayed. Even here, and in the allied fields of animal-painting, the desire for _l'anecdote_ creeps in, and Landseer with all his talent often prostitutes his brush in the attempt to make his brutes the centre of dramatic action, and forces into them semi-human characteristics in