of a stream. The hollow chamber in which the oyster is lodged might have been formed by the union of two waves, magically hardened at the moment of contact; coloured without like the ooze of the earth, within like the deep sea pearl. The fish conforms in shape and symmetry to its living element, and is, in this respect, scarcely more than a wave, or combination of waves. It moves in curves and ripples, in little whirls and eddies, faithfully repeating all the inflections of the water. Even in the least detail it is homogeneous; else, why should the scale of the fish be scalloped rather than serrate? As to colour, has it not the vanishing tints of the rainbow; or might it not be thought the thinnest lamina pared away from a pearl, a transparent rose petal, the finger-nail of Venus?

It is not improbable that the fish furnished the first shipwright with some excellent suggestions about nautical architecture. This shipwright, who was both idealist and utilitarian, had observed the length and slenderness of the fish; its curved sides and tapering extremities, corresponding with the stern and prow of his subsequent invention; also, the fins, which he at first reproduced in rough-hewn paddles, prototypical of genuine oars. Then, perhaps, a paradoxical notion dawning upon his mind that aerial swimming and aquatic flying were much the same things, he added to his floating craft the wings of the bird as well as the fins of the fish ; and soon thereafter began to take the winds into account, to venture out on the broad seas; and finally discovered

'India and the golden Chersonese,

And utmost Indian isle, Taprobane.'

The scaly appearance of a sheet of water wrinkled by the wind has already been noticed by another. It needed only this slight suggestion to point out to me the glistening broadside of an old gray dragon sunning himself between the banks. Do Dol. phins inhabit fresh water? Just under

the surface, at the bend of the creek, I see a quivering opalescent or iridescent mass, which I take to be a specimen of this rare fish, unless, indeed, it should prove only a large flat stone, veined and mottled by sunbeams shot through the thin veil of hurrying waters. Equally suggestive are those luminous reflections of ripples cast on that smooth clay bank. Narrow shimmering lines in constant wavy motion, they seem the web which some spider is vainly trying to pin to the bank. They are, properly, 'netted sunbeams.' Water oozing from between two obstructing stones, and slowly spreading out into the current, has the appearance of a tress of some colourless watergrass floating under the surface. I was once pleased to see how a drift of soft brown sand gently sloping to the water's edge, with its reflection directly beneath, presented to the perfect figure of a tight-shut clam-shell,-a design peculiarly suited to the locality.

A fish

In cooler and deeper retirement, on languid summer afternoons, this flowing philosopher sometimes geometrizes. It is always of circles,-circles intersecting, tangent, or inclusive. darting to the surface affords the central starting point of a circle whose radius and circumference are incalculable since the eye fails to detect where it fades into nothingness. Multiplied intersections there may be, but without one curve marring the smooth expansion of another. There are hints of infinity to be gathered from this transient water ring, as well as from the orb of the horizon at sea.

Sometimes I bait the fish, but without rod or hook, and merely to coax them together in small inquisitive schools, that I may study their behaviour and their medium of communication. In this way I enjoy the same opportunities for reverie and speculation as the angler, without indulging in his cruelty or forerelish of the table. I discover that the amusements of the minnows and those of the small birds are quite similar, with only this differ

ence that the former, in darting and girding at one another, make their retreat behind stones and under little sand bars, instead of hiding among the bushes and tilting over thistle tops. It would seem that fish are no less quick in the senses of hearing and seeing than the birds themselves. They start at your shadow thrown over the bank, at your voice, or at the slightest agitation of the water.

'If you but scantily hold out the hand, That very instant not one will remain; But turn your eye, and they are there again.'

When they first came up in the spring, I thought they looked unusually lean and shadowy, as though having struggled through a hungry hibernation. They were readily voracious of anything I might throw to them.

There were fish taken under my observation, though not by line or net. I did not fish, yet I felt warranted in sharing the triumphs of the sport when, for the space of ten minutes or more, I had maintained most cautious silence, while that accomplished angler, the kingfisher, perched on a sightly elm branch over the water, was patiently waiting the chance of an eligible haul. I had, meanwhile, a good opportunity for observing this to me wholly wild and unrelated adventurous bird. Its great head and mobile crest, like a helmet of feathers, its dark-blue glossy coat and white neckcloth, make it a sufficiently striking individual anywhere. No wonder the kingfisher is specially honoured by poetic legend. I must admit that whenever I chanced to see this bird about the stream it was faultless, halcyon weather. I occasionally saw a sandpiper (familiarly, walk-up-thecreek') hunting a solitary meal along the margin. I had good reason, also, to suspect that even the blackbird now and then helped himself to a bonne bouche from the water. Then, did I not see the fish, acting on the law of talons,' come to the surface, and take their prey from the life of the air?

This was the fate in store for many a luxurious water-fly skimming about the sunshiny pools, like a drop or head of animated quicksilver. The insect races born of the water, and leading a hovering existence above it, had always a curious interest for me. What, for instance, can be more piquing to a speculative eye than to watch the ceaseless shiftings or pourings of a swarm of gnats? Is there any rallying point or centre in this filmy system? Apparently there are no odds between the attraction and repulsion governing the movements of the midget nebula, and I could never be satisfied as to whether unanimity or dissent were implied. Nor could I quite justify by my ear the verse which says,

Then, in a wailful choir, the small gnats

mourn

Among the river sallows,'

since, although I could vouch for the vocal powers of a single gnat humming with unpleasant familiarity, I have never detected any proof of concerted musical sound among a swarm of these motes. Yet I doubt not the poet is right.

There is a larger species of mosquito (not the common pest), which I should think might some time have enjoyed religious honours, since, when it drinks, it falls upon its knees! A flight of these gauzy-winged creatures through a shaft of sunlight might conjure up for any fanciful eye the vision of 'pert fairies and dapper elves.' Of the dragon fly (which might be the inlaid phantasm of some insect that flourished summers ago), I know of no description so delicately apt as the following

:

'A wind-born blossom, blown about, Drops quiveringly down as though to die; Then lifts and wavers on, as if in doubt Whether to fan its wings or fly without.'

Where is the stream so hunted down by civilization that it cannot afford hospitality to at least one hermit muskrat The only water animal extant of the wild fauna that was here in the red man's day, he will eventually have

to follow in the oblivious wake of the beaver and otter. It is no small satisfaction that I am occasionally favoured with a glimpse of this now rare oldest inhabitant.' Swimming leisurely with the current, and carrying in his mouth a ted of grass for thatching purposes, or a bunch of greens for dinner, he disappears under the bank. So unwieldy are his motions, and so lazily does the water draw after him, that I am half inclined to believe him a pygmean copy of some long extinct river mammoth. Oftener at night I hear him splashing about in the dark and cool stream, safe from discovery and molestation.

Hot, white days of drought there were in the middle of the summer, when, in places, the bed of the creek was as dry as the highway; vacant, except for a ghostly semblance of ripples running above its yellow clay and stones. The fountain of this stream was in the sun and heated air. Walking along the abandoned water-road, I speculated idly about the fate of the minnows and trout. Had they been able, in season, to take a short cut to the lake or to deeper streams, as is related, in a pretty but apocryphal story, of a species of fish in China, fitted by nature to take short overland journeys?

Much might justly be said in praise of the willow. Its graceful, undulating lines show that it has not in vain been associated with the stream. It practises and poses over its glass as though it hoped some time to become a water nymph. Summer heat cannot impair its fresh and vivid green,- only the sharp edge of the frost can do that; and even when the leaves have fallen away there remains a beautiful anatomy of stems and branches, whose warm brown affords a pleasing relief to November grayness.

At intervals I met the genius of decorative art (a fine, mincing lady) hunting about the weedy margin for botanical patterns suitable for reproduction in æsthetic fabrics and paper

hangings. She chose willow catkins, cat-tail flag; the flowers and feathery afterbloom of the clematis, golden-rod, and aster, and showed great anxiety to procure some lily pads and buds that grew in a sluggish cove; but for some reason, unknown to me as well as to the genii loci, she slighted a host of plants as suggestive for ornate designs as any she accepted. She took no notice of the jewel weed (which the stream was not ashamed to reflect, in its velvet, leopard-like magnificence); nor had she any eyes for the roving intricacies of the green-brier and wildbalsam apple. She also left untouched whole families of curious beaked grasses and sedges, with spindles full of flax or silk unwinding to the breeze.

It is nothing strange that the earlier races of men should have believed in loreleis and undines, nixies and helpies. I cannot say that I have not, myself, had glimpses of all these water-sprites. But the watered green silk in which the lorelei and the undine were dressed was almost indistinguishable in colour and texture from the willow's reflection; and the nixie was so often hidden under a crumbling bank and net-work of black roots that I could not be sure whether I caught the gleam of his malicious eye, or whether it was only a fleck of sunshine I saw exploring the watery shade. About the kelpie I am more positive. When the creek was high and wrathful under the scourge of the lime storm,' it could have been nothing else than the kelpie's wild, shaggy mane that I saw ; nothing else that I heard but his hoarse, ill-boding roar.

In this season of the year, I became aware that our stream, like the Nile, had its mysterious floating islands, luxuriant plots set with grass and fern and mint (instead of lotus and papyrus), and lodged upon pieces of drift washed down by the spring floods. All summer securely moored in the shallow water, they were now rent up by the roots, and swept out of all geographical account. Snow-like accu

N the last paper we endeavoured

IN

to show what was the condition of the Art world of Great Britain at the beginning of the eighteenth century. But the closing years of the previous one produced a genius of such originality and power as to render, in succeeding ages, the name of British Art an epithet of most honourable import. For the first time an English painter had taken brush in hand to mark out a path of his own, instead of emulating the achievements of Verrio and Laguerre as his predecessors had done. For the first time an attempt was made to break through the conventions of traditions and imitations, and to establish a genuine and national style of art in England; when, following these connoisseurs of the beginning of the art, all at once from among these painters of ceilings and manufacturers of goddesses arose a prophet, with a commission to deliver-urgent, violent and terrible to the dissolute, careless world, then rolling so fast on its downward way.'

To Hogarth therefore belongs the honour of having been the founder of English painting, as he was the first great original master, 'who,' we are told, 're-opened the obstructed path to nature for his cotemporaries and successors, and down this cleared path so long hidden by a growth of sham sentiment and honest incapacity, he was followed more or less intelligently by all the great English masters of the eighteenth century, who, however, instead of treading directly in his footsteps,

turned from side to side, garnering new truths, and observing fresh beauties, which each recorded in his own peculiar language. He filled the place in English art which Fielding and Smollett filled in English literature. Although by some considered a mere caricaturist, we know that he was in reality a powerful preacher of great truths, a rebuker of folly, and a commender of virtue and modesty.' Horace Walpole says, if catching the manners and follies of an age, as they rise, if general satire on vices, and ridicule familiarized by strokes of nature and heightened by wit, and the whole animated by proper and just expressions of the passions, be comedy, Hogarth composed comedies as much as Molière. It was character, the passions, the soul that his genius was given him to copy; his strength lay in expression, not in colour and chiaro-oscuro. He knew well the truth of Horace's maxim, 'ridiculum acri fortuis ac melius plurimumque secat res,' and he made ridicule of his vocation.

There was nothing harsh or misanthropic in it. It was the ridicule of Addison, kindly rebuking faults which it half excused.' He himself tells us, that he deliberately chose the path in art that lay between the sublime and the grotesque, and in this wide region he has certainly achieved an unparalleled success. Sometimes, indeed, he goes beyond his aim,' says Dr. Trusler, and in the earnestness of passion reaches the height of the sublime; but often on the other hand, he falls into cari