Still that was the King, no doubt of it, a corpulent embodiment of power, might, and majesty; and no wonder that he was surprised and delighted with the warmth of the popular reception. No such ovation had ever greeted him in England: indeed, during the Queen's trial, he had become an object of vituperation to the multitude, who were but too well acquainted with the scandals of the period, and whose rough sense of equity had been offended by a charge of infidelity being preferred against the wife, when the husband was notoriously liable to the same reproach. When he came to Scotland all personal considerations were cast aside. The homage of the nation was paid to the king, and not to the man. It was loyalty that dictated the movement, not affection or esteem; a signal proof of the deep-rooted attachment of the nation to the principle of hereditary monarchy.

One other glimpse I obtained of George the Fourth, and that was on the occasion of the procession from Holyrood House to the Castle. On the day of his entry into Edinburgh, the weather was propitious, the sun shone out brightly, and gave lustre to the pageant. But the effect of the later procession was marred by a heavy wind and drenching rain, most damaging to plumage and embroidery. We had places in a gallery erected on the esplanade of the Castle Hill, and, as I remember, had to wait a long time before the procession appeared. The plight of the Royal Archers, who lined the way, was piteous to behold. Most woeful did they look with their dripping hats and thawed ruffs, exposed to the pelting of the storm on a day when even Robin Hood would have been glad to leave the deer of Sherwood unmolested, and take refuge in the hermitage of Friar Tuck. There was, however, one lull, in the midst of which two persons of unpretending appearance, and in ordinary costume, walked up the centre of the way. One of them was a tall man of massive build, with a slight stoop in his shoulders and an imperfection

in his gait, a man whom, when you once had seen him, you felt certain you could recognise again at any distance of time. His companion did not attract my attention; but I remember well that, as they passed, there arose from the crowd a cheer of more than common heartiness and fervour, and I heard my uncle say that these were Sir Walter Scott and Mr Peel, then Secretary of State.

Amidst the plashing of the rain and the blustering of the wind, up rode the cavalcade, gallantly. contending with the elements; the Regalia being carried by the representatives of the first houses in the land. Up, too, came the royal carriage, but this time it was prudently closed; and yet the assembled multitude were not balked of the sight of the monarch, for shortly after he had entered the grand old fortress, when the gale was blowing most fiercely, and the great folds of the royal standard were rushing out, George the Fourth appeared alone on the brow of the highest battery, erect and commanding, in the view of all the people, and such a shout arose as possibly never before was given in greeting to a king.

Of the rest of the proceedings and shows of that memorable periodthe illuminations, bonfires, and the like I retain but a faint impression. What I have already noted is all I can recall without an effort; and though it may hardly be worth the telling, for a more perfect record exists elsewhere, I could not bring myself to omit mention of a pageant certainly the most magnificent which has been witnessed in the present century, and perhaps without a parallel since the Field of the Cloth of Gold. And yet, notwithstanding the universal enthusiasm which was displayed, the vast concourse of people from all parts of the country to behold their monarch, and the gorgeous parade of ceremony, sure I am of this, that a far wider and deeper homage of loyalty, affection, and reverence, than was paid to George the Fourth, is accorded to Queen Victoria when she seeks her Highland home.

66

MR RUSKIN has been before the world for some years as the most voluminous, the most confident, and the most dogmatic of art-critics. He has astonished his readers no less by his platitudes than by his paradoxes. He has revealed the astounding fact that Titian and Velasquez could paint, and had made the no less surprising discovery that Raphael could not t; that Rembrant's chiaroscuro is always forced, generally false, and wholly vulgar;" that Murillo, Salvator, Claude, Poussin, Teniers, and "such others," are base and corrupt; that it is the duty of every one who happens to possess the principal works of Strange, Morghen, Longhi, and the other great line-engravers, forthwith to consign them to the flames; and that the horrors of the French Revolution were attributable to the Renaissance school of architecture. These kind of assertions, conveyed in a light, confident, and flippant style, are amusing enough, and, as long as Mr Ruskin's audience is confined to those who have some real knowledge of the subjects of which he treats, do no harm, but pass off as the fanfaronade of some clever half-crazy talker does at the dinner-table, when no one thinks his amusing absurdities worth a serious answer, and he is tolerated as an oddity until he becomes intolerable as a bore.

Mr Ruskin has, however, of late appeared as a lecturer to the working classes, and a teacher of drawing to beginners in the art; and in this character he assumes, upon what ground we do not exactly know, a kind of semi-official authority.

Now he may be, and we have no doubt is, a perfectly safe and harmless companion for the young ladies who draw at Marlborough House, but he is a dangerous guide for those who do not possess considerably more knowledge than himself: those who do, may follow his vagaries so long

as they find them amusing, and quit them when they please, without much harm being done. But the persons to whom Mr Ruskin specially addresses himself, in his Letters to Beginners, will, we are convinced, derive nothing but mischief from his teachings. We have read these Letters with attention, and we can discover no reason why Mr Ruskin should not follow up the Elements of Drawing with elements of naval tactics, horsemanship, engineering, dog-breaking, political economy, rat-catching, domestic cookery, moral philosophy, and the duties of husband and wife, upon any or all of which subjects he is fully as well qualified to teach as he is to instruct beginners in the elements of drawing.

Even so early as his Preface, Mr Ruskin makes a display of ignorance which is perfectly astounding. He tells his pupil that " perspective is not of the slightest use except in rudimentary work;"§ that "no great painters ever trouble themselves about perspective, and very few of them know its laws;" that "Turner, though he was Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy, did not know what he professed, and never drew a single building in perspective in his life;" and that "Prout also knew nothing of perspective," and twisted his buildings, as Turner did, into whatever shapes he liked. This is precisely equivalent to saying that a knowledge of anatomy is not of the slightest use to the surgeon, that no great operator ever troubled himself about it, and that Sir Astley Cooper and Mr Liston were utterly ignorant of the science they professed to teach.

Drawing consists in the art of representing on a plane surface the varieties of appearance presented by natural objects as they recede from the eye. Perspective is the science which teaches the artist how to do this correctly; and when Mr Ruskin says that "you can draw

accurate transcript of a great part of the work of nature. But it is a part only, and the very excellence of the photograph in that part, the minuteness and accuracy with which it records what it does contain, renders it unfit for the purpose of being copied from, by reason of the impossibility of following it accurately. At the same time, the omissions and variations which are inherent in the nature of the process, make it equally unfit, for reasons the very reverse. Photographs are necessarily affected by the local colour of the objects,thus yellows print off darker, and blues lighter than in nature; and as colour is universal in all natural objects, this renders them not merely useless but mischievous as copies for the student, and requires that they should be used with caution even by the accomplished artist, who may derive considerable service from them as memoranda by which to fill up the details of his sketches, or supply the defects of his memory.

Our limits will not permit us to go step by step with the student through the maze which Mr Ruskin has prepared for him, or to point out the quagmires and sloughs of despond which await him on his journey; we must hasten from Mr Ruskin's teaching to his practice.

In the third volume of his Modern Painters, Mr Ruskin has given us as a frontispiece his exposition of "Lake, Cloud, and Sky," drawn by himself, and very beautifully engraved by Mr Armytage. We do not intend to subject this work to criticism, such as might fairly be applied to the production of any professional artist; we shall handle it gently; but Mr Ruskin is a teacher, and we may, therefore, fairly require that his work should at least be free from such errors as a moderately intelligent pupil, who had received half-a-dozen lessons from an ordinary drawing-master, ought to be ashamed of committing.

The scene which Mr Ruskin has selected as the subject for his pencil is in the neighbourhood of Como. The sun, sinking behind a distant mountain, pours a flood of light along a valley rich with woodland

and meadow, through which a glittering stream winds its peaceful way past towers and trees, and beneath the arches of picturesque bridges, whilst the eye of the spectator (who is supposed to be at an elevation of about eight hundred feet). is sheltered from his rays by a group of fantastic clouds, under which they are showered down upon the landscape and the lake beneath his feet. The subject is simple as well as beautiful, and we shall proceed presently to examine how Mr Ruskin has treated it. Before we do so, however, we must (at the risk of telling him what he is already very possibly acquainted with) remind the reader of one of the simplest rules of Mr Ruskin's despised science of Perspective.

The rays of the sun are, as every one knows, parallel to each other. It follows that the shadows of vertical objects cast upon a horizontal plane are also parallel to each other. When such shadows are to be represented in a drawing, it is necessary, in order to give the effect produced upon the eye correctly, that they should be drawn so that if their lines were prolonged they would all meet in one common focus, on some point level with the eye of the spectator, which point is called the vanishing-point.

When, therefore, the position and direction of any one such shadow is determined (which, of course, must depend upon the relative position of the sun, the object that casts the shadow, and the spectator), the position and direction of all the rest may be found by means of lines drawn from the vanishing-point of that shadow past the base of the objects which cast the others. We will now apply this rule to Mr Ruskin's drawing.

The eye of the spectator, he tells us, is about eight hundred feet above the lake; the horizon (as it is technically called), or line opposite to the eye, is therefore considerably above the top of the tower on the righthand side of the picture-probably about level with the line of mist that crosses the distant mountain.

Now on the margin of the lake there are a number of trees, standing on a flat alluvial plain, all of which