Both

cloudy sky and part of a tree. pictures are in the Kensington Museum. The identity of the composition makes the difference in the colouring more striking. If we look at the second picture through a yellow glass, the difference between the two almost entirely disappears, as the glass corrects the faults of the picture. The smockfrock of the boy no longer appears of that intense blue which we may see in a lady's silk dress, but never in the smock-frock of a peasant. It changes into the natural tint which we find in the first picture. The purple face of the boy also becomes of a natural colour. The shades on the neck of the girl and the arms of the child, which are painted in a pure blue, look now grey, and so do the blue shadows in the clouds. The grey trunk of the tree becomes brown. Surprising is the effect upon the yellowish green foliage, which, instead of appearing still more yellow, is restored to its natural colour, and shows the same tone of colour as the foliage in the earlier picture. This last fact is most important to prove the correctness of my supposition. My endeavour to explain it became the starting-point of a series of investigations to ascertain the optical qualities of the pigments used in painting, and thus to enable us to recognize them by optical contrivances, when the vision of the naked eye does not suffice to analyse the colours of a picture.

When I had the pleasure of showing this experiment with Mulready's pictures to Professor Tyndall, he drew my attention to the fact that one single colour, namely, the blue of the sky, was not affected by the yellow glass. The blue of the sky was almost the same in both pictures. I could not at once explain the cause of this, but I discovered it afterwards. The fact is, it is impossible to change the sky-blue of the first picture so as to form a colour that looks like it when seen through a yellow glass. If more white is added, the sky becomes too pale; if a deeper blue is used, it becomes too dark. Mulready

was thus forced to content himself by giving to the sky in his later pictures the same colour as in the earlier ones.

If we look at Mulready's earlier works through the same yellow glass, they lose considerably in beauty of colouring the tone appears too weak; the shadows brown; the green, dark and colourless; we see them as he saw them, and understand why he became dissatisfied with them and changed his colouring.

It would be more important to correct the abnormal vision of the artist, than to make a normal eye see as the artist saw when his sight had suffered. This unfortunately can only be done to a certain extent.

If it is the dispersion of light which, as in Turner's case, alters the perception of nature, it can be partly rectified by a kind of diaphragm with a small opening (Donders' sthenopeical spectacles).

In cases of astigmatism, the use of cylindrical glasses will completely correct the aspect of nature, as well as of the picture. Certain anomalies in the sensation of colour may also be counteracted to some extent by the use of coloured glasses; for instance, by a blue glass, when the lens has become yellow, as in Mulready's case.

If science aims at proving that certain works of art offend against physiological laws, artists and art crities ought not to think that by being subjected to the material analysis of physiological investigation, that which is noble, beautiful, and purely intellectual will be dragged into the dust. They ought, on the contrary, to make the results of these investigations their own. In this way art critics will often obtain an explanation of the development of the artist, while artists will avoid the inward struggles and disappointments which often arise through the difference between their own perceptions and those of the majority of the public. Never will science be an impediment to the creations of genius.

FIVE-AND-TWENTY years have passed since I first saw Mazzini. It was in a room in the north part of London, where he had politely called, in acknowledgment of a slight claim I had on his acquaintance through my friendship in another city with a fellow-countryman of his who was very dear to him. I remember well the first sight of him, as he entered, sat down, and immediately began to talk. He was then thirtyeight years of age, retaining much of that grace and beauty for which he had been famous when he first fascinated his Genoese college-companions, drew them into sympathy with his dreams, and imagined the association afterwards known as Young Italy. One knew at once that slight figure, in a dark and closely-fitting dress, with the marvellous face of pale olive, in shape a long oval, the features fine and bold rather than massive, the forehead full and high under thin dark hair, the whole expression impassioned and sad, and the eyes large, black, and preternaturally burning. His talk was rapid and abundant, in an excellent English that never failed, though it was dashed with piquant foreign idioms, and pronounced with a decidedly foreign accent. The matter on that occasion was discursive, and the manner somewhat distrait, as if he were on a visit of courtesy which he wanted to get through, and which need happily involve no farther trouble to his recluse habits and the pursuit of his many affairs. He was then living in an obscure off-street from the City Road, somewhere beyond the New River, in the house, I believe, of an Italian tradesman, who was one of his devoted followers; but one had been forewarned that he did not expect chance visitors there, and that indeed such visitors would not be

likely to find him. As it happened, however, this my first sight of Mazzini was by no means the last. By a concurrence of circumstances, I met him again and again in the house of one or another of the very few English families that enjoyed his intimacy, till at length I came to know him well, and what hardly promised to be an acquaintanceship became for me one of the friendships of my life, for which I thank Fate and which I shall ponder till I die. Through many years, as he flashed from England to the Continent, and from the Continent back to England, I watched him, with some general knowledge of his designs, -at one important crisis, indeed, with thorough admiration, and such hopes for his success as could not but be yielded by any who understood the grand essentials of his drift, and the state of the poor Italy he longed to renovate; afterwards with undiminished affection, but perhaps more of doubt and dissent, as he pushed on, past great achieved success, to those extreme specialities of his programme about which one was more indifferent or less informed. Vaguest of all is my cognisance of his doings during the last seven or eight years. No longer in London, save at intervals, I had lost the customary opportunities of seeing him, and a newspaper rumour now and then, or a more private message sometimes as to his whereabouts and the state of his health, was all I had to trust to. The last time I saw him was, I think, about two years ago. He was then in a lodging at Brompton, and I found him painfully emaciated and weak from long illness, but full of kindly interest in persons and things, his spirit unabated, and the black eyes beaming with their old lustre. And now he is dead at Pisa, at the age

of sixty-three; and, while the world at large is agreeing that all in all he was one of the most memorable men of his time in Europe, but there are the strangest variations in the particular estimate, here am I recalling my own experience of him, the memory of bygone evenings in his society, the sound of his voice amid other voices, and the touch of his hand at parting.

"Friends, I owe more tears To this dead man than you shall see me pay."

Above all, it is as the Italian Patriot that the world thinks of Mazzini. The summary of his aims in that character had been set forth by himself, systematically and once for all, as early as 1831, when he was first a refugee in France, flung out from his native land in the ardour of his pure youth, and with no other means of acting upon that land than conspiracy and propagandism.

Italy must be a Republic, one, free, and independent! This was the programme of the Young Italy Association, inscribed in all its manifestoes, and repeated and expounded everlastingly. Grasp the phrase in its full meaning, and in all the items of its meaning, and you have that political creed from which Mazzini, as an Italian politician, never swerved, and never, save perhaps at one or two moments of practical exigency, could be made even to seem to swerve. But, though the phrase was from first to last a glowing whole in his mind, and the

very accusation against him was and is that he would not break it into its items, the fact that it does consist of items which may be taken separately ought to be distinctly apprehended in any retrospect of his life. The items are three, and they ought to be taken in the reverse order the Independence and Freedom of Italy first, the Unity of Italy next, and the Republicanism of Italy last. First, next, and last, I repeat, were the very words which Mazzini abhorred in the whole matter. The first could not be except by and with the next, nor that except through the last; if the new Italian Patriotism was

to be worth anything, if it was not to be mere Macchiavellism or mere Carbonarism revived, and to die out in pedantry and cowardly drivel as these vaunted originals had done, its very characteristic must be that the three things should be kept together in thought, and that in action every stroke should be for all at once, or for one as implying all! Nevertheless, if only to demonstrate this necessary identity of the three ideas, they might be held up separately in exposition.

The Independence and Freedom of Italy! This meant the hurling out of the Austrian, whose hoof had been so long the degradation of her fairest provinces, and the rectification at the same time of the petty domestic tyrannies which the Austrian upheld. Well, where was the Italian that could say nay to that, and where over the wide world were men-themselves living and breathing as men, and not lashed and tortured like beasts-that could refuse this deliverance to the Italians whenever the time should come? About this part of the programme there could be no controversy.

Ay, but the Unity of Italy! What necessity for that; what chance of it? Did not many of the wisest Italians themselves look forward merely to an Italy of various governments, each tolerably free within itself, and all perhaps connected by some kind of Federation; was not that also the notion of the most liberal French politicians, and of the few Englishmen that troubled themselves with any thought about Italy at all? Universally, would not the speculation of a United Italy be scouted as a mad Utopia? Let them rave, replied Mazzini. The idea of a single Italian nation, one and united, had been, he maintained, an invariable form of thinking in the minds of all the greatest Italians in succession, from Dante to the Corsican who had Europeanized himself as Bonaparte; and an examination of the practical conditions of the problem of Independence and Freedom would also, he maintained, show that problem to be insoluble except in the terms of Unity.

Well, but why a Republic? If some existing Italian potentate, with due ambition in his heart and something of better fibre to aid (Charles Albert of Piedmont, for example, once a Carbonaro, and with some shame of his recreancy said to be gnawing at his conscience and stirring to thoughts of atonement), if such a potentate, already in command of an armed force, were to head a war of Independence, drive out the Austrian, and cashier the rabble of tyrannical princes, would there not then be a United and Free Italy, and might not the crown be his? Or if, in the course of a popular revolution, some great soldier were to emerge, crashing the opposition, like another Napoleon, by his military genius, would it not be in accordance with analogy, and for the security of the work done, to raise him to the sovereignty? Young Mazzini had ruminated these questions, and one can see signs of a faltering within himself before he answered them. Republican as he was, Republican as he meant to be, there was plausibility in the forecasts hazarded. Facts might take that course; it was the way of facts to take any course; precedents were perhaps in favour of the agency of kings and great soldiers in wars of national liberation; it would not do for a young theorist, who would welcome his motherland liberated anyhow, to stand too stiffly on the banks of his own ideal channel towards that end, only to see it empty after all, and events flowing in another! Hence a certain published Appeal to Charles Albert, much talked of at the time. The Appeal was read by that monarch; and he threw it into his waste-paper basket, with orders that, if ever the writer showed his face again in Italy, he should be laid fast in the nearest prison. No need then, Mazzini concluded, for any farther hesitation. The Republicanism so dear to himself in theory was put into the programme of the Young Italy Association, as equally indispensable with the oath for Independence and Liberation and the vow of ultimate Unity. The reasons were duly given. The advent of a

Patriot-King, or of a conquering soldier who would win the freedom of his country by winning a crown for himself, was declared to be an impossible pheno

menon.

The time for such things was

past. There were epochs and eras in human affairs, and when an old era came to a close the methods of that era ceased to be the methods of Providence. Mazzini always had this large semi-mystical way of reasoning about eras and epochs, of listening to the vast march through the vacancies of Time, and being sure of its divisions and halts. Especially he announced that the world had passed through the stage of Individualism, Macchiavellism, the accomplishment of God's purposes for humanity by the mere deeds and scheming of particular persons, and that the era of Association, collective effort, action by the will and heart of every people for itself, and of all peoples united, had at least begun. The very struggle for Liberty which had been going on, with ever-increasing results, through all previous ages of the world, had consequently now changed its form and the state of its parties. Essentially the struggle had always been one between Privilege and the People; but the battle in all its previous forms of antagonism had rather been for the People than by the People. Such forms of the eternal contest had been that for Personal Liberty against Slave-owning, the Plebeians against the Patricians, Catholicism against Feudalism, the Reformation against Catholicism, Constitutional Government against Arbitrary Power. Now, however, that Privilege had been brought to its last agonies by such a succession of contests, the essential nature of the struggle which had been involved in them all was more nakedly disclosed. What had always been a struggle between Privilege and the People might now proclaim itself in all the simple generality of that name; and the People themselves, in the final strife against the last shreds and fastnesses of Privilege, might be their own proctors and advocates, and might dispense with champions and intermediaries. Yes! all the complexities of the social

tackling, all the scaffoldings of the supposed pyramid, had now been struck away, and the People, assembled multitudinously as on one level plain, might look up direct to Heaven, with nothing to distract the view. Dio e PopoloGod and the People- such, for all peoples, was to be the true formula of the future. Translated into ordinary political language, this, for most peoples, could mean only Pure Republicanism. In Great Britain alone would Mazzini recognise an exception. For certain positive and practical reasons, connected with her special insular history, he thought Constitutional Government suitable for her, and likely to be suitable for a long time to come. But of all nations Italy was the one specially fitted for Republicanism. Her greatest traditions, her peculiar glories, were Republican. Whatever associations of coarseness, cruelty, or meanness other nations might have with the word Republicanism in recollection severally of their past histories, the word had come down in the Italian mind entwined with memories of heroism, high-mindedness, Poetry and Art at their noblest, all that was exquisite and even fastidious in scholarship and culture, the fullest richness of social life, the truest enterprise in commerce, the utmost originality of individual genius. Let Young Italy represent the real soul of the nation! Paying no heed to the remonstrances or the jeers of the so-called Practical Statesmen, the Pedants and Diplomatists, the Individualists and Macchiavellians, let them blazon on their banner the symbol of an Italian Republic as the only possible form of a future Italy that should also be independent, free, and one!

For forty years Mazzini fought for the programme of his youth. He lived to see part of it accomplished, and he has died labouring for the rest.

For seventeen of these forty years (1831-1848), he was known only as the Italian agitator and conspirator, driven from France into Switzerland, and thence into England, corresponding incessantly by unknown means with his adherents in various parts of Italy, dif

fusing his ideas more especially among the youth of Italy by contraband writings and a machinery of secret societies, and promoting every possible attempt at an insurrection anywhere in the Peninsula. He was near the end of this stage of his career when I first saw him. Respectable England had grown alarmed, some two or three years before, at the existence of such a man within her bounds, and had begun to question whether he ought to be allowed a continued refuge in London. Sir James Graham, as Home Secretary, had opened his letters in the post-office; there were the wildest stories not only of his promoting insurrections, but even of his encouraging assassination. But the storm had passed, and had been followed by a reaction. Sir James Graham had been obliged publicly to retract the most odious of his charges; English indignation had been roused at the discovery of a spy-system in a Government office; Mr. Carlyle had published his letter, avowing his personal intimacy with Mazzini, and testifying that, whatever he might think of Mazzini's "practical insight and skill in worldly affairs," he knew him to be, if ever he had seen such, "a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity, humanity, and nobleness of mind." By that time also, other persons of distinction in the metropolis, knowing Mazzini by his more purely literary contributions to English periodicals, had contracted the same high regard for him, and there were particular English families whose proved affection for him drew him at length gently and irresistibly out of his exclusive daily companionship with the Italian refugees that formed his working staff, and made him and these associates of his happier, not only by their sympathies with the Italian cause generally, but also by their aid in schemes of relief for the poor Italians in London, and of schooling for their children. And so Mazzini lived on in London, with his eyes always on Italy.

How strange to remember now the accession of Pius IX. to the Popedom