strongly imbued with a sense of the wonderful and marvellous in actual creation that they need no art, no veiled suggestion of the hidden, in order to realise that our lives are wrapped in mystery from the cradle to the grave. This quality in painting alluded to, fits in with that taste in literature which prefers hints to assertions--that insistency on the value of what is, after all, but a _fugitive_ phase in special temperaments--that setting most value on the principle of suggestion rather than of definition, of which we hear so much. The devotees of Maeterlinck delight in the shadow of a thought rather than the thought _arrêté_; they feel that a further stage of refined culture is reached in worshipping a style you have to get somehow behind, rather than one in which thoughts are fully and frankly expressed. Doubtless it requires a more subtile weapon to catch the fleeting aroma, the hint of a thought trembling in the brain and giving it permanent existence in Art, than to carve the expression of a complete idea explicitly with cameo-like precision, be it in the form of words or a visual impression--the wise sayings of a Solomon or a Bacon, the sculpture of a Pheidias or the painting of a Leonardo da Vinci. The actual visible facts in the aspects of nature, which were of such entrancing interest to Leighton, become of less and less interest to the wide public as the human intelligence is trained more and more through books, less and less through the eye; our modern conditions making the world we live in, more and more ugly and uninspiring to the echoing tune of nature within us. Even if we recede into the depths of the country, we find the signs all round us of the sense of beauty being deadened, the revulsion against ugliness having ceased--corrugated iron supplanting thatched roofing, and the loveliest, most rural spots in England year after year newly deprived of some special charm they have possessed for centuries. Those who seek for beauty have been led to find it in the unreal--the things which might be, but are not. We cannot help it, but we certainly become more artificial as our civilisation becomes more complicated, and everything we see around us grows uglier. It is because the general public has so little genuine interest in Art or love of beauty, however great may be its professions, that the tendency has developed to care for the art which appeals rather to the mind and the æsthetic sensibilities generally, than to the actual vision.