of the wiseacres amongst our artists and connoisseurs have discovered that the idea and composition of it has been stolen from Mr John Faed's Cruel Sisters. Curious, if true. No. 236, The Poet and his Wife, by D. Maclise.Very remarkable for its wonderful detail and careful finishing these fuschias and passion-flowers are most marvellously rendered. There is great want of life, however, in the figures and their expression-like sisterly kisses or veal sandwiches, rather insipid. No. 76, Dead Plover; No. 446, Mill on the Ogwin; and No. 437, Morning —J. W. Oakes—are three very exquisite little pictures, by an artist not yet appreciated as he ought to be. Note particularly the charmingly aerial sky, and delicatelypencilled and well-detailed foreground of No. 76. shows, to our thinking, a most marvellous lack of not only taste, but appreciative knowledge of Art in the Hanging Committee, their thrusting of this little picture into this out-of-the-way place.

It

The same remark applies with still more force to their treatment of Mr Rothwell's pictures, which, with the exception of one of Mr Graham Gilbert's, are the finest examples of colour exhibited this year, and yet not one of the three is hung where it can be satisfactorily seen. If it was the nudity that was objectionable in the Calista, why, bless their mealy mouths, if not fit to be hung on the line, then, surely it ought not to have been hung at all. These three pictures, Nos. 214, 112, and 55, are perfectly lovely and beautiful, and oh, ye artists of Edinburgh, your vacant hours cannot be better employed than in studying them. No.328 is a fair example of E. W. Cooke, in his present somewhat tinny manner. Nos.108, Autumn, and 186, Spring. J. Linnell. Philosophy has been defined as a home sickness, a wish to be everywhere at home. We wish we could have here given such a

philosophical analysis of Mr Linnell's art, as would have conveyed to our readers some certain knowledge of it, and so domesticated it amongst us. That, however, being impossible in a couple of pages, we shall for the present content ourselves with simply noting down a few of the thoughts suggested to us by these two pictures. Mr Linnell is the first landscape painter of the day. He is the last of a mighty race that has just passed away-ultimus Romanorum. In his own peculiar walk of Art, not only has he surpassed all living artists, but he has surpassed those of all time. "With Gainsborough," says Ruskin, "died in great part the art of painting, and exists not now in Europe." It did not. The colour of Rubens still glows on the palette of Linnell. He is no lesser Gainsborough -he adds a precision and fullness of detail and completion of his subject which that painter never dreamt of. What Gainsborough too often only hinted at, he has done. Without the unparalleled versatility and universal power which places Turner at the head of all landscape Art, he has succeeded in accomplishing what he has aimed at, more perfectly than even Turner did. In the rendering of simple English landscape, he has never been equalled. In intellectual power and technical knowledge he is alike pre-eminent-truth and ideality, the beautiful and the sublime are his. His touch has all the ease and apparent carelessness, and is full of the capriciousness of nature. So perfect is his skill, that it is utterly lost sight of-forgotten in its results. So much so that, by the ignorant and partially enlightened, he has been denied even the power of handling his tools. Though one of the most real of our painters, he makes no attempt at pre-Raphaelite deception it is a realisation to the mind he aims at. Eminently truthful, he never descends to the mechanical copying of natural objects: it is the spirit rather than

the material he gives. As a strong man using nature— never cringing to her; and while taking all he can from her, giving all he can in return. Yet in this nineteenth century, so anxious justly to appreciate all genius, for nearly forty years this man lived and worked unappreciated, unrewarded, and almost unnoticed. While in his leisure hours he was painting merely to lumber his painting-room, pictures at which all men now marvel, to keep body and soul together, and also to put money in his purse (a love for grubbing together which he possesses in common with some kindred spirits in Art), he was making himself useful generally-etching and engraving, painting portraits, and making his own shoes and grinding his own

Well, for some forty years, painting pictures such as no man painted before, and cobbling shoes, he kept siegeing at this enlightened nineteenth century of ours, in the end carrying it by storm in a very tremendous manner. During his later years, his painting of pictures has been rather a levying of tribute than anything else. His manner has become slighter and more sketchy than it was in the days of his meridian prime, but it is still supremely masterly. In the latter style are these two pictures. No. 186 is by much our favourite. We advise our readers at once to dismiss all thoughts of looking at this picture in a critical mood, but with child-like confidence believing in it, endeavour to appreciate its beauties. If a seeing of its merits is difficult, keep turning from it for a few minutes, looking at the other pictures around, always returning to it every five minutes or so, and we vouch for it that very soon its colour will make itself apparent in contrast to the paint of others; also its wondrous atmosphere and depth-tree standing out from tree-bush retiring behind bush-till you have lost altogether the feeling of Art and Exhibition-room, and

are wandering amidst the spring woods, gorgeous with the brilliant tints of the opening leaves-the woodpigeons fluttering overhead, and everything glowing in the sunshine. "Some call on the imagination here, Mr Critic" True, most courteous reader; but all high-class Art is an appeal to, and only to be thoroughly enjoyed by the imagination.

Landscape being the predominating element in the present Exhibition, we shall now proceed to notice the principal works by our native artists in that department.

At the head of the Scottish landscape-painters stand two artists whose reputation is a complete reversal of the saying that a prophet has no honour in his own country -Mr Horatio Macculloch and Mr George Harvey. Both have long been regarded throughout their native land as men of great original power, but beyond its borders the one may be said not to be known at all, while the other is but partially known, and not at all appreciated. It is not difficult to account for this. Apart from considerations of a more strictly personal nature, both had, at the age at which they might have migrated to London, achieved a position in Scotland, which it would have been somewhat hard to have quitted for the lower level from which they would have started in England. Both are, besides, so essentially Scottish in training, in feeling, in style, in everything, that their works would have been but partially understood, and slowly appreciated. Mr Macculloch's style, though formed to a certain extent on the works of John Thomson of Duddingstone and John Ewebank, is thoroughly original. He is the one painter of Highland scenery we have yet seen. It is his specialty, by virtue of an imagination which appreciates the grandeur of our mountain land, a province of which he has taken possession by dint of ardent study. Even his

faults of occasional hardness of outline and brownness of colour, are to some extent, the results of the same process which has developed his excellences. Although his range of subjects has not been confined to Highland landscape, he is most individual, only thoroughly individual, we may say, when his foot is on the heather. It is with the delight with which memory goes back to wander among grand and beautiful scenes in nature that we remember some of Mr Macculloch's works-his sunny glades amid the ancient oaks of Cadzow-his Loch an Eilan, with its broad masses of light and shade-his Dream of the Highlands-his Pine Forest of Braemar-his Misty Corries, haunted by the red deer and the kingly eagle-the breezy bleakness around the rocky shores of Skye, and the stormy grandeur of its mountains-the queenly Lomond and her wooded isles-Kilchurn, "child of loudthroated war"-the sheiling that nestles in the shelter of the beetling cliff-the lowland river gleaming in the moonlight, or gliding between its sylvan banks in the sunset's golden glow. The art that can so give us the spirit of Scottish scenery as to make even the recollection of its achievements a solace and a delight, is true and great Art. It is the work of one who has been let into the secrets of nature-it carries you away to nooks in the woods where the flicker of the broken light among the branches is an amenity, or to where you feel "a presence that disturbs you with the joy of elevated thoughts," on the wide, brown, lonely moorland, still as a shipless sea when the winds are weary.

It is, perhaps, the pleasantly-fresh recollection we have of Mr Macculloch's earlier works which leads us to regard their breadth and power of poetic feeling as higher qualities than are displayed in some of the pictures he paints now, for even he has not altogether escaped the