ing," by means of which brilliancy is obtained by the division of the field into two parts of different hues, those parts of the figure or principal charge which fell on the first being of the colour of the second, and vice versâ. The painter stands, fair-haired, grey-eyed, and darkly clothed, looking intently on the brilliant brunette in light-coloured raiment sitting at ease before him. One cannot help constructing a theory of the relations between these two. Ribalta seems to be waiting so wistfully for some expression of sympathy for his art-to be hungering for some word of approval or sagacious criticism. It must be confessed that she looks a little indifferently on the picture he is showing her. What might he not accomplish if he could excite in her something more than polite interest in his work? Will the fire slumber for ever in those languorous eyes, the fire ie used to know how to waken not many summers ago nay, that he saw glow so hotly only three nights since, as the young Count Fernandez whispered to her under the oleanders at the Duke's ball?

Three hundred years have rolled away since this canvas was painted, and still Francisco stands waiting, waiting for the light that is never to shine for him again. Admitted that this is all pure surmise (in this particular case it happens to be misleading surmise: there is nothing of revelation in it), the painter and his wife might have been the most humdrum of couples -he intent on pot-boilers, she wrapt up in narrow household cares, or the petty problems of millinery-yet there is something in the juxtaposition of the figures to stir the imagination as portraits in separate frames never could do. Herein is an echo of the eterna.

concord of marriage-man and the help-meet created for him, "the melodye in heauen whiche clerkes clepen armony "-not less thrilling because it is in the mournful minor key.

By the by, it is not more than just to Ribalta and his wife to end this allusion to them by explaining that they were very far from being either humdrum or dissatisfied with each other; on the contrary, their love-story ran on a high level of romance, as the writer discovered when, his interest in them being excited by the picture, he hunted up what is preserved of their history. It is not the least likely that the artist's wife ever showed indifference either towards him or his art, for she was herself the daughter of a painter, of whom the young Francisco became a pupil. He incurred his master's displeasure by falling in love and carrying on clandestinely with the lovely daughter. Love-making being peremptorily interdicted, the young painter left the country and worked for three or four years in Italy. Coming home thence to Valencia, he strolled one day into his old master's studio, and finding an unfinished painting on the easel, coolly set to work to finish it. The old man, returning, was struck with admiration for the excellence of the unknown painter's work. "Ah!" he exclaimed, turning to his daughter, "here has been some one whom, if I could find him, I would gladly welcome as a son-inlaw-an artist, indeed, very different from that idle dauber Ribalta." How wickedly those dark eyes must have flashed as the maiden explained to her sire the trap into which he had fallen!

Would that some of the many scores of couples who sit each year for their portraits would act on the lesson drawn from the Spanish

painter's composition! the interest and beauty of family portraits would then be multiplied manifold. Instead of a series of persons obviously posed to be painted, hung at regular intervals upon the walls, we might enjoy a succession of realistic studies of bygone lives; husband and wife-lovers still playing chess or piquet, or puzzling over their household bills; mother and daughter busy together in one of their countless common occupations-anything to escape from the dreary impression inseparable otherwise from a portraitgallery, that of a waiting parlour, full of people showing no shred of interest in each other or anything else, condemned to be for ever dumb and idle.

With statuary the case is somewhat different. Here colour is sacrificed to enhance the effect of form; there is nothing to confuse the eye in contemplation of the contrasts which abound in the ideal human body. Hence it comes that the most beautiful statues are those of single figures, and much of their fascination is owing to isolation— to the contrast of the white unchanging marble, raised above the eye level, with the crowd, chattering, whispering, perspiring, and elbowing through the gallery. It is not often that the presence of living human beings, and the incidents of modern life, serve to enhance the sentiment of a picture, yet it sometimes happens that this is so. Two such occasions occur to remembrance while these lines are being penned. The scene of the first was the picture-gallery at Bridgewater House, where the Conservative party assembled after their disastrous reverse at the polls in 1880 to take counsel with their chief, the late Earl of Beaconsfield. Midway between the two ends of the saloon hung a full-length Ma

donna by Murillo, and it was immediately in front of and below this picture that the ex-Premier rose to address the assembly. Many of those present must have been struck by the singular group thus formed: the colouring of the man and the effigy were one; the same brush might have laid the sallow flesh tints and painted the black raiment of each. The Virgin's pose

spreading her hands over the statesman's head and bending her mournful gaze upon him-seemed to express her concern in what concerned him, and there was little in the restrained gestures and passionless expression of Disraeli to dissociate living flesh from simulacrum. But this unison served but to accentuate the contrast between the sorrow of Mater Dolorosa and the senator's anxiety for the fortunes of a political party.

The other example referred to occurred at the Royal Academy banquet last month. Those who have seen Mr Calderon's picture representing St Elizabeth of Hungary's great act of renunciation, can surely never forget the terrible scene depicted. Light streams into a dark chapel from a narrow window behind an image of the crucified Christ, and falls on the shoulders of the queen, who, having laid aside her garments in token of absolute abnegation of parents, children, friends, and everything else that endears itself in this world to our human nature, kneels clinging to the altar, her dainty head bowed low between her outstretched arms. Behind her, ill defined in the gloom of which he seems an embodied part, stands Conrad of Marburg, who devised and imposed this mortal sacrifice. Altogether the piece is one of unutterable anguish, only to be endured in virtue of unfaltering faith in the wickedness of the world, and the sure reward for

those who have fortitude to cast away the good things of this life. Now for the contrast-the strange "uncanny" contrast-presented to all who had eyes to see. This weird picture hung immediately behind the gilded chair occupied by the President at the banquet. On his right and left sat Royal Highnesses, right honourables, men distinguished by birth, by position, or by achievement, and the feast proceeded with all the luxury that civilisation and wealth enables men to enjoy. As if to emphasise the queen's sacrifice by a living example of the pomp she was laying aside, there was drawn up, according to custom, behind the chairs of the principal guests, a line of scarlet-coated, epauletted, powdered lackeys, whose function is to stand still and do nothing while the company is served by less gorgeous attendants. Far be it from these lines to convey the lesson that stately hospitality is an evil thing in itself, or that a good dinner is to be avoided because there are many who have to go to bed without any dinner at all.

"We hae meat, and we can eat,

And sae-the Lord be thankit !

But we are none of us any the worse, while we delight our souls with fatness, of being reminded that there have been those to whom the Word of God has proved sharper than any two-edged sword, "piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and body." Never was this lesson more poignantly brought home than in the manner described above: it was soothing to take counsel after it with an easy-going philosopher, and to hear what comfortable words Xavier de Maistre saith in this matter: "Et pourquoi (mon âme) refuserait-elle les jouissances qui sont éparses sur le chemin difficile de la vie? Elles

sont si rares- -si clair-semées, qu'ils faudrait être fou pour ne pas s'arrêter, se détourner même de son chemin pour cueillir toutes celles qui sont à notre portée."

To return for a moment to the consideration of wherewithal we choose to clothe ourselves. In the art of dress the right use of contrast is as essential as in any other art, and by observing its laws it is possible to mitigate the evil effects wrought by the prevailing mode. One vital principle to be insisted on is, that no natural feature or limb should be so clothed as to seem a distortion. The chimney

pot hat is, in itself, about as ugly a device as could be conceived, yet it is better than the "billycock' for this reason-that by no illusion can one be betrayed into thinking that the head which it clothes is so shaped as to require that peculiar form of covering. Its lines are opposed to the lines of the human skull. But it is otherwise with the billycock: here we have a black dome like an exaggerated cranium, distending the form of the head beneath it in such a manner, that one landing from a distant planet among a Sunday mob in Hyde Park would imagine that he had come among a race of "swelled heads." In like manner the dress of women, which has passed through many beautiful phases of late, is liable to this discordant treatment. Shoulders that by nature have a sweet and delicately modelled contour are suddenly concealed-nay, distorted— by hideous puffs, not made to look like freaks of millinery but like swelled joints; and the waistah! why will fashion not permit it to remain in appearance where it is in reality, just under the bosom, as Romney and Raeburn loved and knew so well how to depict?

Orators rarely speak as if they understood the value of contrast perhaps because very few public speakers ever are at the pains to learn the rudiments of their art, but tumble haphazard into whatever style of speech they happen to be naturally inclined to. Hence the hums and haws which mar the listener's interest; hence the unrelieved flow of eulogy or invective, according to the subject. Montaigne tells us of the more æsthetic practice of the countrywomen of his day :

"En une contrée près de nos montaignes les femmes font le prestremartin, car comme elles agrandissent le regret du mari perdu par la souenance des bonnes et agréables conditions qu'il auoit, elles font tout d'un train aussi recueil, et publient aussi ses imperfections. De bien meillure grace encore que nous, qui à la perte du premier cognu, nous piquons à luy prester des louanges nouelles et fausses; et à le faire tout autre, quand nous l'auons perdu de veuë, qu'il ne nous sembloit estre quand nous le voyions."

So it is in literature; the unrelieved gloom of such a work as Count Tolstoi's 'Kreutzer Sonata' defeats its proper aim, which is to depict the blackness of guilt. True, there is plenty of black used, but the absence of one brighter touch not only fails to give the full effect of darkness, but oppresses the senses with the intolerable sameness of denunciation. The effective moralist knows how to make use of tender and humorous passages to bring out true pathos and rouse indignation against evil. Unconsciously we derive much of the interest and pleasure of existence from the contrast between the past and the present. But, oddly enough, we invert the relation which would naturally be expected to present itself between

them. The formula given by oldfashioned drawing-masters for composing a landscape was: "Distance-mystery; middle-distance

gloom; foreground-brilliancy;" and thus, not inaptly one would think, the scene of history might be summarised. The early tradition of our race lies dimly seen and nebulous on the horizon, merging into the shadows of superstitious ignorance of the dark ages, and light increases steadily and lies more brightly on the records of later times. After men have been toiling and scheming for so many ages to compass the comfort of their kind, and to store up riches and knowledge, it cannot surely

be but that life on this earth must be lighter and brighter than of old.

But it is notorious that few people will admit that to be so -none, indeed, except lovers and children, and they, being creatures not in full possession of reasoning powers, are hardly worth consideration. None, that is, that can get anybody to listen to what they say, so we need not take the prophets into account, for no one has ever paid more than passing heed to them. Even a remark on this subject by Solomon himself, the wisest of men, seems to have attracted no attention: "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this."

"The good old times" hold their place well in the popular sentiment, in spite of all that can be proved against them in the matters of intolerance, violence, tyranny, cruelty, ignorance. We sigh with Hood's young lady :—

"O days of old, O days of knights, Of tourneys and of tilts, When love was baulked, and valour stalked

On high heroic stilts,

Where are ye gone?

cease,

The world gets tame and flat, We've nothing now but New Police— There's no romance in that."

The fact is, that they do contribute beauty to history by contrast with the present. Men and women dimly recognise this, and attribute all the beauty to the past alone. It is not difficult to find an illustration of this. Acts-even crimes -that we should read of in the morning paper with horror or disgust as happening among ourselves, often lose their repulsive aspect after the actors have been long laid to rest. As Théophile Gautier observes: "Il se fait d'ailleurs d'étranges revirements dans les réputations, et les aureoles changent souvent de têtes. Après la mort, des fronts illuminés s'éteignent, des fronts obscurs s'allument. Pour les uns, la posterité-c'est la nuit; pour les autres c'est l'aurore."

:

"Les aureoles changent souvent de têtes" for one person who has heard of Elizabeth of Hungary, and been touched by the sorrow of her living sacrifice, thousands have mourned for the fate of Francesca da Rimini; yet the one, in renouncing her earthly crown, fulfilled the highest act of faith, and crucified the affections of the flesh, by yielding to which the other won for herself a place in undying story. Strange justice this! it will seem the stranger if we reflect on the relative judgment passed by contemporary opinion upon Father Damien, whose selfabnegation was as complete as St Elizabeth's, and the leader of the Irish parliamentary party, whose undoing has been the same in kind as that of Paolo and Francesca. The first has won for himself unstinted eulogy the other has been denounced as for

Less than a century is sometimes required to effect this regilding of tarnished fames. History owes much of its charm to the foibles of great men and the frailties of fair women: we hoard relics, the only value of which consists in their association with persons whose manner of life would exclude them from modern respectable society, and affectionately preserve even the garments of those, from contact with whom, were they to come among us again, we should bid our daughters draw aside their skirts lest they should be contaminated. Much of the love and regret that we bestow on the past are of the nature of rightful affection; but much is owing to the fact that it is past, and is lavished on those things which, were they among us still, would be objects of distrust or contempt.

An attempt has been made to show that true contrast is indispensable to beauty, and therefore can never produce discord. Contrast, that is to say, as distinct from mere difference, for there are acts and qualities the very nature of which exclude them from the scheme of beauty-the presence of which inevitably creates discord. These qualities are mainly twostupidity and cruelty; perhaps if this pair were cast out, this would be such a sweet world that we should cease to look for a better one to come.

Moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores." The presence of Lazarus at the gate of him who was clothed in purple and fine linen was no true contrast, it was a hideous discord- a loathsome taint in the existence of one who planned and paid for luxurious living, and neither planned nor