the ridge cuts the sky and nothing else is seen against the sky but the tops of a few trees which grow on the farther slope. It is impossible to say which of the two pictures is the nobler. The bigger and fuller picture may, indeed, be a greater work of art than the smaller one could ever be, and yet that is so very small a fact! What the artist has done is, first, to make a design out of the material afforded him by a broad landscape and the varied sky, and in the other instance to make a design out of a monotonous grassy slope, a few tree-tops, left unaccounted for except by the beholder's intelligence, and a very uniform gray firmament beyond. Who shall say which is the nobler design of the two? Mr. George Moore has published an essay well worthy of consideration, in which he undertakes to show that the "failure of the nineteenth century" in painting is that it has assumed the necessity of taking a subject in the literary sense, in the moral sense, in the sense of those frequenters of picture-galleries who prefer the picture which is to them the most like a novel, or a pathetic poem in words. The assumption is, and it is certainly a safe one, that those persons who are attracted to these pictures in order that they may study archæology or feel a religious thrill, or be made curious and inclined to look up the facts in either story, or, finally, to feel the domestic pathos of the scene at the sick child's bedside—those students of art are on the wrong track, and will never discover what, in most cases, the painter is after when he paints a picture. Italian art and Dutch art had died before "the subject" had appeared, and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that this evil thing "really began to make itself felt, and like the potato blight, it soon became clear that it had come to stay." And the conclusion is that if the painter would now produce pictures worthy of himself he must reject the temptation to attract spectators by tickling their feelings or showing off his learning, and must paint pictures with painter's subjects only. III