trayal of heroic, or pathetic, or familiar scenes, appeal more directly to the feelings or the experience. Hence the upper gallery of the Bethnal Green Museum, where our national portraits have hung for the last five years, is the resort mainly of small children from the neighbouring streets, who amuse themselves there when the weather is unfavourable for playing out of doors.

is quite content to seek these more ennobling qualities in the history of the old Venetian State, and in the historical and other scenes which Venice's wonderful artists have painted in her famous halls and palaces. It is with nations as with people they have their heroic and their quiet and seemingly trivial epochs. If, for successive centuries, a State declares itself great in word and in deed, it may The collection thus relegated to obbe allowed, at the end of the time, curity is in many respects a remarkable to slumber a while; and no man ought, one; and not the least striking fact conthen, to reproach it for its inactivity. nected with it is the shortness of time There was no pretence about the greatness in which so large and so fairly repreof Venice a few hundred years ago. That sentative a series has been acquired. It ought to be set to the credit of the modern is only thirty-five years since the denizens of the city who, for no apparent fault of their own, have been born at a time when the city has no separate and proud national life. For my part, if I were a Venetian, I should feel much as I imagine the man feels who, after much exertion, at length, when he is old, realises that he is rich. Toils are over; the pleasures of retrospect have begun. Seated among soft, luxurious cushions, I should dwell with pleasure upon my past admirable efforts. Though in the eyes of the dull and the ignorant I might appear an uninteresting old creature, with my grey beard and nervous totter, I should not mind one jot. A man is what he feels himself to be.

So with the modern Venetian. He may be content to seem small, and even ridiculous, to the large, assuming people of the North, for he has the conviction at heart that he has been what they aspire to become.

OUR NATIONAL PORTRAITS.

gallery was founded, and already it numbers over eight hundred portraits, although those acquired since 1885 have not been sent to Bethnal Green, and consequently are not accessible to the public. Established in 1856, through the exertions of Earl Stanhope, and with the co-operation of the Prince Consort, Lord Ellesmere's gift of the Chandos Shakespeare at once conferred dignity on the enterprise; and the collection has steadily grown in size and importance, while the salutary restrictions adopted by the trustees against the introduction of mediocrities and nobodies have kept it fairly representative. It was rightly laid down that "There ought not to be in this collection a single portrait as to which a man of good education passing round, and seeing the name in the catalogue, would be under the necessity of asking, Who is he?"" and that "the success of the whole scheme depended on confining the gallery to men of real distinction, of real fame." If the gallery is to maintain a high national character, care must be taken that these restrictions are not unduly relaxed; although, at the same time, the conditions must be wide enough to embrace all that is best and most worthy of note in our national life and

THE days are now happily numbered in which a collection of portraits, the interest and importance of which to the student of our English history can hardly be over-history. estimated, is destined to remain in obscurity, more than half-forgotten by ordinary people, in the heart of the East End of London. Though the dwellers in that vast section of our metropolis are by no means incapable of appreciating art-as the eager and intelligent visitors to Mr. Barnett's admirable exhibitions at St. Jude's bear eloquent witness-it must be owned that a gallery of portraits alone is not calculated to attract the less educated part of the community so much as pictures which, by their beauty of colour, and por

There is hardly a more fascinating way of approaching the study of history than by gaining familiarity with the actual appearance of the men and women of a given time, and endeavouring to read something of their character from their faces. Not only their faces, but the fashions of their dress, and the way in which they were painted, help to make them more real and living to us. When we get a notable period illustrated by a great artist the charm is complete. Witness, for example, the superb Vandyck Exhibition at the

Grosvenor Gallery four years ago, where we saw as in a mirror the Royalist side of the Civil War. We cannot hope for so comprehensive a picture of any period here as yet, though the literary history of the present century finds a remarkably full and brilliant record; but, taking one or two well-known names, we may group together some portraits connecting themselves with each, and so gain some idea of the value of the gallery as a whole.

Bulstrode Whitelocke, Milton, Andrew Marvell-though the somewhat ill-favoured portrait here represents him in later lifewe see some of the notable men with whom Oliver surrounded himself. Harrington, of the "Oceana," whose interview with Mrs. Claypole we remember; Anthony Ashley Cooper, with his refined, handsome face; Walker's own keen, able face, as portrayed by himself, help to fill up the picture, though we miss, amongst others, Mrs. Claypole herself, Richard and Henry Fleetwood and Fauconberg, Warwick and Thurloe.

If we give place to the ladies, Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth of England at once suggest themselves; but we shall have to It would be tedious to follow this plan admit that our gallery necessarily pales through the later Stuart reigns and those before the glory of the Elizabethan room of the Georges; but the record of the at the Tudor Exhibition of last year, and present century is, as we have already the rare collection of her rival's portraits in hinted, so brilliant that it demands a few the Stuart Exhibition of the year before. words. Here, to name a few only, are Still, from the copies of the Janet and Charles Lamb, painted by Hazlitt, and Oudry portraits, the medallion of Prima- Keats; Leigh Hunt and Byron; Coleridge, vera, and the electrotype from the beautiful Southey, and Wordsworth; Sir Walter Scott, effigy at Westminster, we may form some painted in his study at Abbotsford, and notion of Mary's perplexing personality; sketched by Landseer; Wellington in early while the effigies of Darnley and his mother, life and in later years; Edward Irving, and the portraits of Knox, of the Queen's with a face intense in its spiritual earnestmother, Mary of Lorraine-the Fraser-ness; Arnold, of Rugby; Frederick DeniTytler portrait, long thought to represent son Maurice, Carlyle, and Darwin; Dickens, Mary herself of the boy James the Sixth, Thackeray, and George Eliot; Lawrence, and of old Buchanan of the "Detectio," Outram, and David Livingstone. Bust serve to give life and colour to the stormy and painting and pencil sketch are all days of her reign. Elizabeth we see, pale pressed into the service, and the result is and haughty in comparative youth; pale of the highest interest and value. and severe in later life; old and ill-favoured on the defaced coin the original of which is at the British Museum; majestic in her last repose in the effigy from the Abbey. Of the men who filled her "spacious times," whose portraits we can study, may be named Leicester and Essex, Burghley and Cecil, Raleigh and Hunsdon, Nicholas Bacon and Sir Thomas Gresham, the Earl of Cumberland, wearing the Queen's glove in his hat, Shakespeare's Southampton, and, above all, Shakespeare himself.

There is a small, but choice collection of autographs, from which we may single out an Admiralty order, signed by our friend Samuel Pepys, whose portrait, in his brown "Indian gowne," holding his "musique" of "Beauty, Retire," referred to by him on several occasions with much complacency, is here; a receipt for two hundred and fifty pounds, to which Nell Gwynn has, with some difficulty, affixed her straggling initials; an interesting note in which Mrs. Siddons "takes the liberty to If we pass on to the Commonwealth, we inform" a young aspirant to the stage, find Walker's fine portrait of Oliver Crom-"that, although she herself has enjoyed all well, in which the sternness of the face, with its keen eyes, is accentuated by the severe simplicity of the armour in which the figure is entirely clad; while this is contrasted so happily with the soft grace of the fair-haired boy in red, who bends to tie his master's scarf. Compare this with the portraits by unknown artists, with the bust by Pierce, and the bronze bust by an unknown sculptor, and we shall have perhaps a more vivid idea of the great Protector than before. In Ireton, John Howe in his earlier years, John Owen,

the advantages arising from holding the first situation in the drama, yet, that those advantages have been so counterbalanced by anxiety and mortification, that she has long ago resolved never to be accessory to bringing any one into so precarious and so arduous a profession"; and a summons to attend the Queen's Coronation, in which Her Majesty's signature, with far more character than those of her immediate predecessors, is seen to have already that firm, yet flowing style by which it is still distinguished.

But there is another train to go before ours, and this a real midland excursionto Birmingham and back in the day, for five shillings. Such places as Birmingham are independent of the weather, for as nobody is likely to go there in sheer lightness of heart and for the pleasure of the thing, so no one having reason to go there is likely to be deterred by a little rain. And thus Birmingham, on wheels, is pretty thickly inhabited already, and people are still hurrying up.

Altogether not a propitious outlook for the | Rye House should be close at hand, with last of the season. But there is comfort in its associations of ancient "plot and reflecting that we may find better weather modern bean-feasts. But the railway takes at the other end. For our destination is a turn to the right, leaving the vale of the the Norfolk coast, the west coast of Norfolk River Lea for that of the Stort, and the if you please, for it has a west coast, what- train almost comes to a stop as it rumbles ever sceptics may say to the contrary, and slowly past the station of Burnt Mill, on that coast stands Hunstanton; whence, About the mill and when it was burnt on favourable occasions, you may see the there is nothing definite to be gathered; sun sink glowing into the salt sea waves. but Harry is now awake, and surveys the And to go to Hunstanton and back for four placid rural scene, where the channel of shillings, which is what we are promised the quiet little River Stort is marked out on the small bills, considering that the by an irregular line of willows. Here was place is more than a hundred miles distant the scene, he explains, only yesterday, of from where we stand, is a marvel of cheap one of the funniest games that ever was travelling, anyhow. played upon the inoffensive brethren of the angle. The Stort, it seems, is a favourite resort of many of the metropolitan angling clubs, and the last Sunday of all was fixed for a grand international tournament, and some three hundred competitors came out betimes to dispute the prize. But when they reached the riverbank no river was there. It had disappeared in the night-the water drawn off by an irate proprietor. "Some of those red-tiled roofs," said Harry, indicating farm buildings in the distance, "might have lost their covering, but that a strong force of county police were on the ground to keep the peace.' The notion of running the river dry rather takes the fancy of the company, and suggests an anecdote about a man who, in his cups, undertook to drink the sea dry. "I'm on for the sea," he says, when they brought him down to his work; "but I don't undertake the bloomin' rivers." And, as the other party could not stop the rivers, the man took the cake after all. The story is as old as Egypt; but it comes in quite freshly here, and brings us along cheerfully to Bishop's Stortford, where everything is as quiet and rural as can be imagined, with a few cattle-trucks in a siding, suggestive of cattle-markets and fat and lean kine.

By the time Birmingham is disposed of, Hunstanton is ready to take its place. There is no great crowd at present to take advantage of the last of the season; that last shower sent many intending passengers to bed again. Even Harry may be looked upon as a doubtful starter, for there is nothing that damps his ardour so much as a smart shower of rain. But he arrives just at the last moment, and gets in as the train is gliding away. Harry is radiant in light grey tweed, with a cap of the same on the back of his head; but he is not in his usual radiant spirits. Monday morning, he explains, has followed too close upon Sunday night, and he is more disposed to sleep than to rattle on in his usual cheerful

manner.

Our excursion train has a good deal to say at the small suburban stations that thickly A rich and peaceful country lies around line the route, each of which has a few us, with the square embattled towers of passengers for us, who are sanguine about churches showing here and there among the weather, and make sure that it is going the trees. Here is a village which boasts to clear up presently. But after leaving its own little station, an ancient church, Tottenham the train frisks along, putting a green castle mound, and red-tiled on speed as it goes, and we have only a roofs moss-grown and lichen-covered; glimpse of Broxbourne, on one of the the village does not concern itself with prettiest reaches of the River Lea, and us, and we run on into a more bare and with an ideal "Anglers' Rest," where Isaac open country, where the white chalk Walton might still feel himself at home, gleams upon us from cuttings here and notwithstanding the changes that have there on the hill-side. We pass through passed over his favourite waters. And quite a deep cutting of hard grey chalk,

but