As For Endymion, Of Course If Lord Beaconsfield Had Thought Oxford Would Be Good For Him, He Could, As Jones Pointed Out To Me, Just As Well Have Killed Mr. Ferrars A Year Or Two Later.

We feel satisfied, therefore, that Endymion's exclusion from a university was carefully considered, and are glad.

I will not say that priggishness is absolutely unknown among the North Italians; sometimes one comes upon a young Italian who wants to learn German, but not often. Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as essentially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic characteristic; and if an Italian happens to be a prig, he will, like Tacitus, invariably show a hankering after German institutions. The idea, however, that the Italians were ever a finer people than they are now, will not pass muster with those who know them.

At the same time, there can be no doubt that modern Italian art is in many respects as bad as it was once good. I will confine myself to painting only. The modern Italian painters, with very few exceptions, paint as badly as we do, or even worse, and their motives are as poor as is their painting. At an exhibition of modern Italian pictures, I generally feel that there is hardly a picture on the walls but is a sham - that is to say, painted not from love of this particular subject and an irresistible desire to paint it, but from a wish to paint an academy picture, and win money or applause.

The same holds good in England, and in all other countries that I know of. There is very little tolerable painting anywhere. In some kinds, indeed, of black and white work the present age is strong. The illustrations to "Punch," for example, are often as good as anything that can be imagined. We know of nothing like them in any past age or country. This is the one kind of art - and it is a very good one - in which we excel as distinctly as the age of Phidias excelled in sculpture. Leonardo da Vinci would never have succeeded in getting his drawings accepted at 85 Fleet Street, any more than one of the artists on the staff of "Punch" could paint a fresco which should hold its own against Da Vinci's Last Supper. Michael Angelo again and Titian would have failed disastrously at modern illustration. They had no more sense of humour than a Hebrew prophet; they had no eye for the more trivial side of anything round about them. This aspect went in at one eye and out at the other - and they lost more than ever poor Peter Bell lost in the matter of primroses. I never can see what there was to find fault with in that young man.

Fancy a street-Arab by Michael Angelo. Fancy even the result which would have ensued if he had tried to put the figures into the illustrations of this book. I should have been very sorry to let him try his hand at it.

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