Naturally, this state of things implies realism in the selection and treatment of subjects. There is no time to idealize. The pencil must seize what is at hand, and serve it up on the spot. Landscapes and figures are flat copies of what the artist sees, and are labelled with their true names. Lorettes, contadine and odalisques are presented to us as such, and not as goddesses, heroines or saints. A ravine in Algeria, Norway or the Rocky Mountains, a sugar-camp in Maine or a wreck at Long Branch, are equally undisguised in their shape and title. The successors of Wilson and Turner no longer compose or combine. They have stopped clipping Nature into bits and sewing her together again like a patchwork quilt. The scenes we meet with on the walls are real scenes, to a tree or a ripple, and the title tells us so. Some liberties are taken with the clouds, and an artificial drapery of light and shade is thrown over the solid objects. Appropriate figures, too, are injected, by way of making up some sort of story and showing that the place is inhabited. But plain, faithful copying, as of an advanced drawing-school turned out of doors, and not pretending to be anything else, is the rule. Not yet is a representation of Ajax or Ariadne, a satyr or a nymph, labelled "Portrait of a Gentleman" or "of a Lady," as the case may be. That may come ere long, with the names, given and family, of the individuals so honored. Till then we do without the Homeric characters altogether, and get Smith and Jones, their spouses and progeny, in dresses and situations they may be readily conceived as filling. All this implies a reign of truth. Truth is a good thing, and nowhere a better thing than in art. But literal truth is prosaic, and the Gradgrind school of art has a tendency to lower us to the hardest kind of facts. Stationary subjects are the choice of the copyist. Asses, ponds, weeds, bottles, melons, young chickens (dead), oysters and decayed trees commend themselves as capital sitters. It is disheartening to the amateur to see his gallery gradually assuming the similitude of a common or a junk-shop. However, an ultra-realistic style cannot prevail long. Human nature cannot bear it, and will insist on springing from earth into a purer, thinner and more impalpable air. A craving for the imaginative will assert itself; and when it does so art will be all the stronger for the discipline and study through which it is now passing. ARTISTIC JENKINSISM. Who was it that, his soul hot within him at the undue predominance of the dead languages in the English university curriculum, declared that the system of facts with which the British graduate of the present day was the most familiar was the intrigues of the heathen gods?