' We must enlist you. Have you not caught the
fever revokitionary ? '
' No ; I have barely begun to live. Lost in the
dreary round of visitations, dinings, and so forth.
All they have done for me is to make me despise
them. Thus out only two years, I am palpablv
cynical.'
' My old romping playfellow of ever so long-
ago has blossomed into a cynic ; surely a fatal
fruition. Liefer have gleefully taken the world
at its word, and thoughtlessly played out the day
in the usual commonplace round. Girls make poor
cynics. Their remanent tenderness fractures the
needed rigid demeanour.'
' Why, you talk in broken hexameters, reminding
one roughly of that luiaccountably odd and wildly
suggestive, luminous, dingy congeries of rapt in-
spirations, " The Bothie of Tober-na-voilach.'" '
' You cap me. Let's leave for a while our high-
flown talk, and drop to simple and wliolesome
personal chatter. Yoiu- aunt ?'
' Is well '
REVIEWS AND NOTES.
The Philistine note which Mr. Quilter strikes in his chorus of crammers, noticed elsewhere, appears again in his solo shriek on taking his far from mediieval way into the New Gallery where the Arts and Crafts Exhibition is now being held. One can easily understand how the self-effacing abhorrer of all the methods of advertising who edits the Universal Review should shudder at the discovery that artists and craftsmen should degrade themselves liy going to the workaday market and crying ' Come buy ! come buy !' Mr. Quilter seems to have imagined that their market was only a goblin one, and that their competition in the world's fair was not to be feared. Is Mr. Quilter's amusing and not very well informed criticism of the E.xhibition not inspired by a feeling, per- haps partly unconscious, that artists who had been supposed to be dreaming had aroused themselves, and seeing from afar the com- petitive game in which the good things of the world are the stakes, had asked themselves, Can we not fight the crowd on its own ground ? Given brains and skill of hand, with a certain prepara- tion of receptiveness in the public mind, and your artist workman, if he be strong enough to wear in the fight, may well hope to show the non-effectives that competition is a game for more than one. Mr. Quilter's sneers at the men who have been instrumental in founding the Arts and Crafts Society are rendered entirely in- effectual by a blunder which it is hardly possible to debit to the printer. The inspiration of the group of artists in question has been drawn, he says, ' either mediately or directly from a single source, and that source is the art of William Michael Rossetti.' To mistake Mr. W. M. Rossetti for his brother Dante Gabriel were hardly pardonable even on the ground of haste. The fact is, that the whole atmosphere of the renascence in English art, of which the group represented by Burne Jones, William Morris, and Walter Crane are the makers, is so entirely unfamiliar air to Mr. Quilter, that he does not breathe it with freedom. The cram- ming system has perhaps reslricted his mental respiration. Mr. Walter Scott published last month Poems of Wild Life, edited by Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts ; and The Life oj Heine, by Mr. William Sharp. The latter volume should form a fitting companion to the volumes of prose and verse translations of Heine which have already issued from the same press. A life of Heine in moderate compass by a competent hand has been much wanted. We regret that the limitations of space compel us to hold over our reviews of these most interesting and valuable additions to the Scott Library. The Editorial Staff of the Daily Neivs have just presented to their chief, Mr. Robinson, his portrait painted by Mr. Ward. The editor-in-chief of the great Liberal paper is represented sitting in his library, by his study table, his hands loosely crossed before him. Over the table hangs the portrait of Mr. Robinson's valued friend, Mr. James Payne, the novelist. The presentation of the portrait has led to cordial expressions of goodwill between the editor and his staiT. OUJI contemporary of the sanguine hue, the Universal Review, conducted and largely written by Mr. Harry Quilter, has, in very desperation to find a mission, taken upon itself the grievous burden of defending things as they are. This month some thirty pages of the Review are occupied by an account of what women have done in various walks, and some six illustrations are given of what women were better employed in not doing. Unless the re- production seriously belittles the draughtswomanship, such Kindergarten pictures as ' Woman's Place ' could only be published by way of awful example. Some sixty pag^ of the same Review are devoted to statistical tables and related papers upon the magazine to which Mr. Auberon Herbert and Mr. James Knowles have applied their candle. The idea of collecting the names of the heads of cramming-houses who approve of competitive examinations, and of the heads of cramming-houses who do not, is thoroughly Quilterian. It would have been more to the purpose, however, if the compiler had included in his scheme the idea of obtaining opinions from physicians who have treated cases of physical deterioration due to cramming, from specialists in mental disease who have met with cases of mental collapse from the same cause, and from those who having a demand for intellectual labourfind it so pro- foundly hard to get men and women unspoilt by the cram system ; and if, in addition, he had had a series of opinions of employers of labour on the difficulty or otherwise of getting effective workmen, or even effective clerks, out of the cram mill. Burns's vigorous phrase only too justly describes this mill, whose unfortunate victims ' gang in stirks and come out asses.'
No more effective assault on educational methods has recently been made than that in which Professor Huxley indulges himself in the somewhat obscure pages of the Transactions of the Linneean Society. In an obituary notice of Mr. Darwin, Professor Huxley describes how at schools and universities — and Darwin had the misfortune to be sent to more than one of each— Jiis masters, tutors, and professors unanimously pronounced him a hopeless dunce. Whatever may in strict judgment be determined as to Darwin's intellectual powers, the verdict of the academies has been reversed with a vengeance. Do they draw out what is in a man or do they repress it ? The opinions of leading crammers, like those to whose autobiographical reminiscences Mr. Quilter gives prominence, are amusing and instructive, and should be published in the Universal Review library, bound up with a re-issue of Pike's Cases of Conscience. ' Do you approve of worrying sheep, Mr. Wolf? ' ' Certainly, does 'em all the good in the world.'
We have received from Messrs. Virtue c& Co. a volume on the Glasgow Exhibition, illustrated by sketches from the pencil of Mr. Raffles Davidson. We have also to acknowledge a volume on the works of Hook, issued from the press of the Art yoiirnal. More extended notice of these books we are obliged to defer.
Edinburgh : T. and A. Constabte, Printers to Her Majesty.
