Taken as a whole, Mr. Hamerton's two volumes have very much the character of an autobiography, which explains at once the striking merits and faults of the writings considered as contributions to the literature of Art. The plan of his work is well understood. The first volume very truly represents Practice, and the second represents Reflection. The first concerns "the active life of a landscape-painter"; the second contains reflections that naturally occurred to that painter, or were suggested by his work. The first chapter of the second volume of his essays is a conclusive statement of the necessity "that certain artists should write about Art." We hope our introduction of Mr. Hamerton will increase the number of serious and patient readers, and that the American Art public will make haste to profit by his thoughts. He is a landscape-painter, and one of the ablest contributors to the "London Fine Arts Quarterly Review." W. M. Rossetti has paid a tribute to his worth as a painter and critic, and even the "Saturday Review" greeted him as a writer of ability. Certainly we take his book to be the latest and best contribution to the literature of Art published since Ruskin's "Modern Painters." Mr. Hamerton's writings are the work of a man who does not decline the free expression of his opinions before accredited masters in Art or Literature. He relies upon himself, when those masters contradict the teachings of his own experience. In this we have the proof of mental manhood, which, among writers, is sufficiently rare, unknown even, to be remarked, and at all times welcomed. FOOTNOTES: [F] _A Painter's Camp in the Highlands_, and _Thoughts about Art_. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. London: Macmillan & Co. THE LUCK OF ABEL STEADMAN. A few months ago I made a collecting tour for Wirt and Company through that stretch of country watered by the Ohio. Thirty years ago I had spent a summer there, and the change bewildered me: not that the rough buckeye and hemlock woods and mountain creeks had been railwayed, canalled, bored for coal, and derricked for oil; I looked for that; but the people had cropped out into a new phase of life. They were lazy, smoky old towns,--those upper Virginia and Kentucky villages,--when I was a young man; something of the solitude of "the dark and bloody hunting-grounds" hanging about them yet; the old forts still standing which had been the terror of the Indians; the grandchildren of the pioneers holding baronial tracts of land under grant from Washington: mule-raisers, most of them, droning out their lives in great rambling stone houses, card-playing, Champagne-drinking, waited on by a few slaves, and carrying in their own tawny skins, high cheekbones, and beetling eyebrows, hints that the blood of these same pioneers had mixed too freely, perhaps, with that of their savage foes and allies.