classes may have cheap and speedy justice and be protected from oppression; the extension of public works, such as ordinary roads, railways, canals, and the means of irrigation, in order to develope to the utmost the vast resources of the country; the gradual admission of natives to places of higher influence, rank, and emolument; the construction of the legislative council of India and of the councils in the presidencies on a more liberal footing, with a view to admitting into them representatives, not only of the independent European element, but of the native populations; and lastly, a renunciation of that policy of annexation which has rendered the well governing of our own territories almost impossible.

*

To establish a fixity of tenure in land, it will be necessary to introduce once for all, throughout our Indian possessions, a welldigested system for raising our revenues, and for apportioning the taxation more equally amongst all classes of the people; removing some of the burden from the land, which has hitherto borne nearly the whole, and placing a share of it upon the moneylenders and traders, who have alone prospered and grown rich under our rule, and have hitherto contributed little or nothing to the charges of the state. A scheme for the gradual redemption of the rent, treated as a land-tax, should be matured, and the Government, without at first attempting to force it upon the people, should take every means of encouraging and aiding those who might wish to avail themselves of it, until the natives of India themselves should see its advantages by its results in the wealth and prosperity of those who enjoy the fee-simple of the soil. At the same time the cultivators and tenants should be protected in their rights by wise and liberal laws. A race of landholders might then be created, and might replace the landed gentry which we have destroyed, as a link between ourselves and the actual tillers of the soil. Colonization would increase; Englishmen of wealth and enterprise might be induced to devote their capital and their energies to the development of the unbounded resources of this fertile land, and we might boast, as Seneca did of the Romans, that' wherever we conquer we inhabit.' It may have been vain to look for such changes as we have pointed out under the East India Company. Now that the government of India is to be transferred to the Crown, let us hope that the weight of public opinion in this country may ultimately bring them about. It is for us to bear in mind unceasingly the stu

* We entirely concur in the proposition made by Lord Ellenborough to send a commission to India to inquire into the finances. This is a question of the utmost importance, as bearing upon the settlement and well-being of the country, and one which has hitherto been lamentably neglected.

pendous

pendous fact, that we have undertaken to rule nearly two hundred millions of our fellow men, and that upon us their present happiness and their future civilization must depend. We have scarcely any direct interest in India except the well-being of its varied populations. If we cannot effect this end, it is a question of the most momentous consideration how far we are justified, either by prudence or by right, in remaining there at all. We derive no revenue for imperial purposes by our occupation; we are by the mal-administration of our finances inflicting on India a permanent debt which may lead to her perpetual embarrassment, and for which England may find herself one day morally responsible; we are exhausting our military resources, and may have to drain them still more to reconquer and maintain our su premacy; and we have taken upon ourselves to govern a vast empire far removed from our shores, which may become a serious source of embarrassment to us, if the day should unfortunately come when this country were threatened with a great war.

One thing is certain, that in the present state of our relations with India every effort should be made to conciliate the people, and to restore confidence in our justice and humanity. From the course already taken, to his infinite credit, by Lord Canning, in opposition to evil councillors and local exasperation, we cannot expect any other policy from him. We cannot wage a war of extermination against a whole race, or even against a whole army. The time is come when we must acknowledge our own errors and deal leniently and mercifully with those who may have been partly driven into rebellion by them. It is for us to remove the seeds of disaffection which have been sown throughout the length and breadth of the land. Some may still persist in denying that the populations have shared or sympathised in the mutiny, and may yet reject the evidence which every fresh mail brings from India. Let us at least take care in good time, that, if this insurrection be quelled, we may not hereafter have to face a second far more general and more formidable-one in which the whole people of India may rise against us, exasperated by a sense of injustice and wrong.

ART.

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-PUBLICATIONS OF THE ARUNDEL SOCIETY:

a. The Life of Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole, translated from the Italian of Vasari by G. A. Bezzi. With Notes and Illustrations. 1850.

b. Giotto and his Works in Padua, being an Explanatory Notice of the Series of Woodcuts executed for the Arundel Society, after the Frescoes in the Arena Chapel. By John Ruskin. 1854. c. Notices of Sculpture in Ivory, a Lecture delivered by M. Digby Wyatt, at a general meeting of the Arundel Society; and a catalogue of specimens of Ancient Ivory Carvings in various collections, by E. Oldfield, M.A. (With Photographic Illustrations.) 1856.

d. Account of Perugino's Fresco of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, at Panicale. By A. H. Layard, Esq. 1858.

e. Photographs after the Paintings by Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice; with Descriptive Notice extracted from Mr. Ruskin's 'Stones of Venice.'

THE

'HE Arundel Society, whose publications we have placed at the head of this article, was founded about nine years ago by several gentlemen distinguished amongst the lovers of art, and known as its most liberal patrons. Of its council were the Marquis of Lansdowne, Lord Lindsay, Sir John Hippesley, the late Mr. Rogers, Mr. Ruskin, and Mr. Charles Newton, since well known from his successful researches on the site of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. It was called after Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, the father of Virtù in England,' whose name is connected with some of the most valuable remains of classic antiquity in this country; and who, according to the author of The Compleat Gentleman,' was 'as great for his noble patronage of art as for his high birth and place.' Its objects were, the preservation of the record and the diffusion of the knowledge of the most important monuments of painting and sculpture, by engravings and other mechanical means of reproduction,' such contributions towards the illustration of the history of art being calculated, it was hoped, to elevate the standard of taste, and Vol. 104.-No. 208.

U

thus

thus have a beneficial influence upon our schools of painting and sculpture.

In pursuance of this design the Society has issued to its members, for the moderate yearly subscription of one guinea, the works we have enumerated; and, in addition, has published, for general sale, three admirable reductions by Mr. Cheverton's process from the Elgin Marbles of the so-called Theseus, the Ilissus, and a group of two horsemen from the Panathenaic procession, and a series of about one hundred and seventy facsimiles in fictile ivory,' of ancient ivory carvings. The figures from the Elgin Marbles have enjoyed a well deserved popularity, and have, it is hoped, had that influence which the highest ideal of the human form, the union of matchless physical beauty with the greatest outward expression of intellectual power-the truest embodiment of the ancient Greek mind-must to all time exercise upon art. The ivories, extending over a period commencing with the second century and ending with the fifteenth, are as instructive to the art-student as to the archæologist, forming, as they do, almost a complete history of the art of design itself, from its decay under the later Roman Empire to its resuscitation in the middle ages.

Last year the Council announced its intention of enlarging the sphere of action of the Society, by publishing a series of copies in colour of the most important frescoes of Italy, as comprising the greatest works of the greatest masters nursed in that cradle of Christian art, and more especially as illustrating the highest object and aim of painting, when forming, as in its best period, an essential part of architectural decoration. We think its decision a wise one, and well calculated, if judiciously executed, to enable those who lack the advantage of seeing the frescoes themselves, to understand their character and merits, and to aid in giving a right direction to that better feeling for art which is gradually, but we trust surely, springing up in England.

Moreover the Society may thus render most material service to painting by preserving, through faithful copies, the record of some of its grandest monuments. Although the frescoes of the golden age of modern art, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the early part of the sixteenth, include the masterpieces of the most illustrious Italian painters, they have been but recently understood or appreciated, and are even yet but little known. They were not, like the easel picture, a portable object of curiosity or of admiration, of actual money value to its owner. They had remained for centuries and would remain until time dragged them from the walls, in public buildings and churches. To keep them in repair and to preserve them from

injury by weather or men's hands money was required; and money is unfortunately not easily obtained for such purposes from the Italian citizen. Covering in rich profusion the sides, within and without, of town-halls, cathedrals, chapels, and convents, they were exposed to every process of destruction and decay. The suppression of religious orders, and of ancient municipal corporations, during periods of revolution or conquest, had led to the desecration, the abandonment, and frequently to the pulling down of these buildings. Such had been the fate of many of those 'public palaces,' the palaces of the people, glorious monuments of Italian liberty, throwing heavenwards their machicolated towers amid the vine-tangled valleys or from the olive-clad hills, their massive architecture casting its cool, dark shade over the narrow streets beneath-stately and stern without, yet within all glowing with the fairest treasures of art, fit emblems of those who had raised them when Italy was still their own and the Italian mind was as yet free. When the deep religious feeling of the middle ages, that union of child-like faith with an earnest impatience of the vices and power of priestcraft -the Dantesque of Catholicism-gave way to an uninquiring pietism and a cowardly resignation to priestly authority, the nimble brush of the academies swept over the solemn, heartfelt outpourings of the early masters, leaving in their stead theatrical groups of muscular apostles and anatomic saints, happily, for the most part, invisible in varnish and chiaro-scuro. Next succeeded the age of whitewash, when a large portion of mankind seem suddenly to have been seized with the one idea that all that is not white is dirt. Then the 'operajo' of the south, like his fellow the churchwarden of the north, with the lime-pail in one hand, and a broom in the other, restored the walls disfigured by old pictures and roba di Giotto,' in which popes, monks, and kings were not always treated with the highest respect and consideration, to a virgin purity more befitting the morals and taste of the times. Lastly, the foreign invader and occupier of Italy still quarters his soldiery and stables his horses in the desecrated church and convent, wantoning in the destruction of what little may remain of their priceless monuments.

A few noble old frescoes, that, by their almost divine beauty, may have stayed the hand of even the Italian destroyer, gradually yielded to the ladder and nails of the sacristan and the carpenter. Who that has wandered in the highways and byeways of Italy has not watched the preparation for a 'festa? Garlands of flowers and green boughs stretching across the street, and the perfume of bay leaves, trampled under the feet of a listless crowd, invite you through the curtained doorway of a neighbouring