John the Baptist, cried, "Repent! repent!"--but Hamerton comes to us as the apostle of a doctrine that needs exposition more than enunciation, and he speaks the words of truth and soberness. Those who did not follow Ruskin laughed and railed at him, and literary executioners hastened to lay violent hands on him. Hamerton's public was prepared by a powerful forerunner, and he is therefore neither assailed nor neglected. Mr. Hamerton's reception in England reflects the nature of his books. He enters the world of letters not as a great and daring rival, not as an irresistible iconoclast, not as an affluent and unhesitating genius,--but as a hearty, cultivated, earnest gentleman who has something worth communicating. He comes to increase knowledge; he comes to throw a light on the obscurity and bring order into the chaos of English Art. For the splendid and misty Turner, the exact and terrible photograph, the great and inconsistent Ruskin, and the vagaries of modern English painters provoked questions and excited conflicts in the world of Art; they seldom reconciled anything among painters, critics, and connoisseurs, too often incapable of a generalization, and therefore incapable of a philosophy of Art. Neither Ruskin nor Hamerton has created a philosophy of Art; they have but contributed invaluable materials. Ruskin, like Buckle, indicated a plan for which no single life is adequate. The drift of Hamerton's Art criticism will best be appreciated in his chapter on "The Relation between Photography and Painting," and that which treats of transcendentalism in painting. We cannot forbear quoting a few paragraphs from the former chapter. The force of the following is obvious. "Photography represents facts isolated from their natural companions, and without any hint of their relation to the human mind. "Now it is only the _unity of relation_ that can satisfy the artistic sense, not isolated fragments; and therefore, so long as the artistic sense remains in the human organization, the demand for pictures will certainly continue. "I wish I could make perfectly clear what is that _unity of relation_ which is so satisfactory to the artistic sense; but that, in these limits, is impossible. It is enough to say here that any perfect "whole" in a pictorial representation of Nature must include delicate colors and beautiful forms, _all helping each other to the utmost_, like a chorus of well-trained singers, and that in the arrangement of it all a great human soul must manifest itself, just as the soul of Handel does in a chorus from the 'Messiah.' "But in the photograph we have only a fact or two clearly stated, but not in their natural connection with other facts; far less their deeper and more mysterious connection, which the genius of great imaginative artists is alone able to apprehend.