testamentary disposition which should be allowed to the individual, and it cannot be said that if a fair time be given for the working out of such measures, the value of landed property would be diminished. Sales would undoubtedly become more frequent, especially of small portions of land; owners would be tempted to break up out-lying estates and put them up to sale in small lots,' after having registered the title and cleared the charges thereon. Plenty of buyers would turn up immediately the various difficulties of title and expenses of transfer were got rid of, the various building and land societies in the country are even now, under the present involved state of our land laws, working in this direction, and we can readily conceive the impetus which would be given for further developing these useful projects.

Labourers would soon become the owners of gardens and cottages. Farmers would often purchase their farms outright. A stimulus to save would be created throughout the whole nation, when everyone could look forward to purchase a house and a small freehold from out of their savings.

Can anyone (even the most outrageous Conservative) deny that the re-establishment of a yeoman class of labourers or farmers would be other than an inestimable boon to this country, and would eventually raise up a class who, instead of being antagonistic to the rights of property, will be among its staunchest defenders. Surely we have in the state of political thought on the Continent enough to warn us that we require in this country to throw up a popular rampart against the growing fallacies of Communism. Is Nihilism, Socialism, and Internationalism to be the creed of the labouring classes on the Continent only, and are we to be for ever free from this fatal political disease? If so, these objects must be secured, and we cannot too early set to work to inaugurate just laws encouraging the greater division of property in land, and thus arm the whole nation against these subversive hordes from the larger towns and restless centres of industry. Can it be supposed otherwise that in the day of trouble arguments and lengthy speeches on political economy will be of any avail. The Tory party, who are rampant to-day at the very thought of the curtailment of the right of the landowners in Ireland, seem not to be able to see the consequences which would result were they successful in their opposition. It is impossible, however, in Ireland, as also it is in England, for one class for ever to monopolise every rational source of happiness in a country, and to place up notice boards to warn off trespassers along every avenue of enterprise, except the one long high road of daily drudgery and labour, or the demoralising bypath of drunkenness, poverty, and crime.

BLANDFORD.

JULES JACQUEMART.

THERE died, last September, at his mother's house in the great high road between the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois, a unique artist whose death was for the most part unobserved by the frequenters of picture galleries. He had contributed but little to picture galleries. There had not been given to Jules Jacquemart the pleasure of a very wide notoriety, but in many ways he was happy-in many fortunate. He was fortunate, to begin with, in his birth; for though he was born in the bourgeoisie, it was in the cultivated bourgeoisie, and it was in the bourgeoisie of France. His father, Albert Jacquemart, the known historian of pottery and porcelain, and of ancient and fine furniture, was of course a diligent amateur of beautiful things, so that Jules Jacquemart was reared in a house where little was ugly, and much was exceedingly precious; a house organised, albeit unconsciously, on William Morris's admirable plan, Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.' Thus his own natural sensitiveness, which he had inherited, was highly cultivated from the first. From the first he breathed the air of Art. He was happy in the fact that adequate fortune gave him the liberty, in health, of choosing his work, and in sickness, of taking his rest. With comparatively rare exceptions, he did precisely the things which he was fitted to do, and did them perfectly, and being ill when he had done them, he betook himself to the exquisite South, where colour is, and light--the things we long for the most when we are most tired in cities-and so there came to him towards the end a surprise of pleasure in so beautiful a world. He was happy in being surrounded all his life long by passionate affection in the narrow circle of his home. His mother survives him -the experience of bereavement being hers, when it would naturally have been his. For himself, he was happier than she, for he had never suffered any quite irreparable loss. And in one other way he was probably happy-in that he died in middle age, his work being entirely done. The years of deterioration and of decay, in which first the artist does but dully reproduce the spontaneous work of his youth, and then is sterile altogether the years in which he is no longer the fashion at all, but only the landmark or the finger-post of

a fashion that is past-the years when a name once familiar is uttered at rare intervals and in tones of apology as the name of one whose performance has never quite equalled the promise he had aforetime given these years never came to Jules Jacquemart. He was spared these years.

But few people care, or are likely to care very much, for the things which chiefly interested him, and which he reproduced in his art; and even the care for these things, where it does exist, does unfortunately by no means imply the power to appreciate the art by which they are retained and diffused. Still-life,' using the awkward expression in its broadest sense-the pourtrayal of objects, natural or artificial, for the objects' sake, and not as background or accessoryhas never been rated very highly or very widely loved. Here and there a professed connoisseur has had pleasure from some piece of exquisite workmanship; a rich man has looked with idly caressing eye upon the skilful record of his gold plate or the grapes of his forcing-house. There has been praise for the adroit Dutchmen, and for Lance, and Blaise Desgoffe. But the public generally-save perhaps in the case of William Hunt, his birds' nests and primroses— has been indifferent to these things, and often the public has been right in its indifference, for often these things are done in a poor spirit, a spirit of servile imitation, or servile flattery, with which Art has nothing to do. But there are exceptions, and there is a better way of looking at these things. William Hunt was often one of these exceptions; Chardin was always save in a rare instance or so of dull pomposity of rendering; Jules Jacquemart, take him for all in all, was of these exceptions the most brilliant and the most peculiar. He, in his best art of etching, and his fellows and forerunners in the art of painting, have done something to endow the beholders of their work with a new sense, with the capacity for new experiences of enjoyment-they have pourtrayed not so much matter as the very soul of matter. They have put matter in its finest light: it has got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches, his pears, his big coarse bottles, his rough copper saucepans, his silk-lined caskets. Jacquemart did it-we shall see in more of detail presently-very specially with the finer work of artistic men in household matter and ornament; with his blue and white porcelain, with his polished steel of chased armour and sword-blade, with his Renaissance mirrors, with his precious vessels of crystal and jade and jasper. But when he was most fully himself, his work most characteristic and individual, he shut himself off from popularity. Even untrained observers could accept the agile engraver as an interpreter of other men's picturesof Meissonier's inventions, or Van der Meer's, or Greuze's-but they could not accept him as the interpreter at first hand of the treasures which were so peculiarly his own that he may almost be said to have discovered them and their beauty. They were not alive to the

wonders that have been done in the world by the hands of artistic men. How could they be alive to the wonders of this their reproduction-their translation, rather, and a very free and personal oneinto the subtle lines, the graduated darks, the soft or sparkling lights, of the artist in etching?

On September 7, 1837, Jacquemart was born, in Paris, and the profession of art, in one or other of its branches, came naturally to a man of his race. A short period of practice in draughtmanship, and only a small experience of the particular business of etching, sufficed to make him a master. As time proceeded, he of course developed; he found new methods-ways not previously known to him. But little of what is obviously tentative and immature is to be noticed even in his earliest work. He springs into his art an artist fully armed, like Rembrandt with the wonderful portrait of his mother lightly etched.' In 1860, when he is but twenty-three, he is at work upon. the illustrations to his father's Histoire de la Porcelaine, and though in that publication the absolute realisation of wonderful matter is not perhaps so noteworthy as in the Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne, there is evident already the hand of the delicate artist and the eye that can appreciate and render almost unconsidered beauties. Exquisite matter and the forms that art has given to common things have found their new interpreter. The Histoire de la Porcelaine contains twenty-six plates, most of which are devoted to Oriental china, of which the elder Jacquemart possessed a magnificent collection at a time when the popular rage for blue and white' was still unpronounced. Many of Albert Jacquemart's pieces figure in the book; they were pieces the son had lived with and which he knew familiarly. Their charm, their delicacy, he perfectly represented, and of each individual piece he appreciated the characteristics, passing too, without sense of difficulty, from the bizarre ornamentation of the East to the ordered forms and satisfying symmetry which the high taste of the Renaissance gave to its products. Thus, in the Histoire de la Porcelaine-amongst the quaintly naturalistic decorations from China (pieces whose beauties Mr. Lang might chaffingly sing about as made to perfection in the reign of the Emperor Hwang '), and amongst the ornaments of Sèvres, with their pretty boudoir graces and airs of light luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and the sleek young abbé her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered with just as thorough an appreciation, a Brocca Italienne, the Brocca of the Medicis, of the sixteenth century, slight and tall, where the lightest of Renaissance forms, the thin and reed-like lines of the arabesque-no mass or splash of colour-is patterned with measured exactitude, with rhythmic completeness, over the smoothish surface. It is wonderful how little work there is in the etching and how much is suggested. The actual touches are almost as few as those which Jacquemart

employed afterwards in some of his light effects of rock-crystal, the material which he has interpreted perhaps best of all. One counts the touches, and one sees how soon and how strangely he has got the power of suggesting all that he does not actually give, of suggesting all that is in the object by the little that is in the etching. On such work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise, that particular praise which, to fashionable French criticism, delighted especially with the feats of adroitness, and occupied with the evidence of the artist's dexterity, seems the highest-Il n'y a rien, et il y a tout.

Execution so brilliant can hardly also be faultless, and without mentioning many instances among his earlier work, where the defect is chiefly noticeable, it may be said that the roundness of round objects is more than once missing in his etchings. Strange that the very quality first taught to and first acquired by the most ordinary pupil of a Government School of Art should have been wanting to an artist often as adroit in his methods as he was individual in his vision! The Vase de Vieux Vincennes, from the collection of M. Léopold Double, is a case to the point. It has the variety of tone, the seeming fragility of texture and ornament, the infinity of decoration, the rendering of the subtle curvature of a flower, and of the transparency of the wing of a passing insect. It has everything but the roundness —everything but the quality that is the easiest and the most common. But so curious a deficiency, occasionally displayed, could not weigh against the amazing evidence of various cleverness, and Jacquemart was shortly engaged by the publishers and engaged by the French Government.

The difference in the commissions accorded by those two-the intelligent service which the one was able to render to the nation in the act of setting the artist about his appropriate work, and, broadly speaking, the hindrance which the other opposed to his individual development-could nowhere go unnoticed, and least of all could go unnoticed in a land like ours, too full of a dull pride in laissezfaire, in private enterprise, in Government inaction. To the initiative of the Imperial Government, as Mr. Hamerton well pointed out when he was appreciating Jacquemart as long as twelve years ago, was due the undertaking by the artist of the colossal task, by the fulfilment of which he secured his fame. Moreover, if the Imperial Government had not been there to do this thing, this thing would never have been done, and some of the noblest and most intricate objects of art in the possession of the State would have gone unrecorded-their beauty unknown and undiffused. Even as it is, though the task definitely commissioned was brought to its proper end, a desirable sequel that had been planned remained untouched. The hand that recorded the ordered grace of Renaissance ornament would have shown as well as any the intentions of more modern craftsmen-the decoration of the Eighteenth Century in France, with its light and luxurious elegance.