OLIVER CROMWELL.

From a 17th Century miniature by Samuel Cooper," the greatest exponent of the miniature portrait."

Connoisseurs' Library." It is idle to deny, he says, that the majority of paintings on ivory to-day can not be placed for a moment on the same level with the productions of other branches of the art of portraiture. This because "they are produced with a minimum amount of effort and study, by the aid or under the influence of the pernicious photograph." The art suffers by the lack of "discretion and culture on the part of the public, and robustness and individuality on the part of the artist."

Never was there a time, he continues, when artists who work in this medium displayed so much technical excellence in the mere manipulation, and so little imagination and inspiration in the treatment. The main reason for this condition seems to be that photography has not only supplied a substitute for the old-time portrait-in-little, but miniature painters have even been led to employ photography as a means to an end. As to the conditions that meet the painter of to-day, Mr. Heath says:

We must acknowledge that the modern painter of small portraits labors under many disadvantages, and has many difficulties to contend with. His position demands a robustness of professional constitution never so necessary as now. He has to face a long-continued degeneracy of the art and a perverted public taste, mainly due to photography. This enemy to the delightful cult has insidiously and in the guise of sincerity slowly warped and misled public appreciation. It has assumed the airs of a fine art when, as a matter of fact, its plumes are borrowed, and it is quite incapable of giving us, in portraiture, any artistic truth other than a weak reflection of some quality rendered far better by the genius of the artist. This is not the worst; under this guise of sincerity it gives us an insipid, unselective imitation that falsifies nature, and has been fruitful in educating a demand for a soft, boneless, characterless prettiness in portraiture, the very antithesis to real style, form, and individuality. .

"Before the advent of photography, the miniaturist reigned supreme as the creator of small portraits. In the century which preceded the discovery of the sensitized plate, there existed an unusual demand for miniatures, and the supply was in the hands of miniature painters of every grade of ability. It may at least be said of the worst of these painters, that he depended for his results on his own efforts alone, and he was rightly considered as an honest member of a recognized and necessary branch of portraiture. To-day the position of the indifferent miniaturist is entirely changed, and the old order of things can never return. The unskilled painter must be made to accept honestly the altered conditions, and must not be encouraged in the belief that he is worthy to rank with the artist of real ability and training. He will none the less continue to be in demand as the servant of photography. It is quite certain that there can be no place for him within the portals of that distinguished guild which is to raise the prestige of the art. Its members will be steadfast to those principles which alone can win

for it recognition among artists as a serious branch of the profession. They will set their art before their reputations, and their reputations before their incomes."

The modern miniaturist has a very serious task before him, says the writer, if he would wean public favor from the "commercial and mechanical miniature portrait," and place his art completely outside it. The seriousness of this task was recognized by the English Society of Miniature Painters, which was organized in 1894. This society erred, according to Mr. Heath, in allowing too large a membership; his own ideal of such a society is sketched in the following passage:

"Twenty members who bound themselves by their enthusiasm for their art to descend to no triviality or pettiness, in pandering to a stereotyped convention, for the mere sake of gain, would ultimately become a source of influence, tenfold greater than a society of a hundred members, the majority of whom take a much lower standpoint and whose ambitions do not rise above a possible income. To do this, the twenty members must possess sufficient robustness to constitute themselves a miniature corporation for the study and advancement of their art. They should fearlessly face their responsibilities and justify their superior aims by the steadfastness of their study and the unprejudiced appreciation and help they tender to rising talent. A society to have a vital influence must do something more than hold exhibitions; its sphere of activity should be more in the nature of a guild. It should hold meetings, invite lectures, acquire representative specimens of the best schools, possess a library, and form a class at which members and probationary members could paint from the life, and so train and prove their ability. Every opportunity should be given to study the history and traditions of the art. Copies of the old masters in miniature should be encouraged, and members and probationary members invited to present such copies to form a permanent gallery belonging to the society. On election to membership a painter should be obliged to present a specimen of his best work to the society, and the confirmation of full membership should not be complete until the acceptance of this diploma work by the council. In suggesting the lines upon which a successful society might achieve its object, that of adding prestige to the art, I claim no originality for my ideas. It is only reverting to a modified form of an old institution-the Medieval Art Guild."

As the miniature portrait has very defined limitations, says Mr. Heath, there is not a wide scope for what may be termed experimental effects of technique. He believes that the art would gain by a uniformity of method, akin to that practised by the technical guilds, and suggests that the early Flemish school would furnish a solid foundation upon which a new and vigorous style might grow up. He adds further:

OLIVER CROMWELL'S WIFE. This is another example of the work of Samuel Cooper, whose miniatures are notable for their marvelous grasp of character.

day sit perseveringly at their easels and see little beyond the tips of their sables. Why is it deemed unnecessary for the aspirant to miniature painting to do more than have a dozen or so lessons, and then launch himself in competition with the painter who has given the best years of his life to training, unless it is the photograph that helps the cripple home? To be capable of deftly painting

Women, he says, have become our leisure class, in the technical sense of the term, by the transference of household industries to the factory, and "it is very gratifying to see how generally they are spending the time thus gained in intellectual effort." And children use the libraries, because they are trained in the public schools to do so. But the number of men who take books out of the town library or go to it for reference is very small." The reasons for this, says The Independent, are two: "First, the men have come to think that there is nothing in the library for them; and, second, they are usually right in thinking so." We read further:

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Women use books as playthings; men as tools. When a woman reads a serious book it is usually to improve her mind; a man generally thinks that there are many other things which need improving more than his mind, and he reads to find out how to do it. Bacon, whose tabloid wisdom is popular because it is so convenient to carry in the vest pocket of one's memory, says: 'Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.' Of these motives the first and the second are more apt to be dominant with women and the third with men. That is why the studious man looks into more books and reads fewer than the studious woman. For information in itself, apart from any apparent use, man has little liking. He may not be more practical, but he is more objective than a woman."

The writer thinks that the large predominance of women in library work and management has tended to increase the feminization of the public libraries. In consequence," the town library is to be classed rather with municipal amusements, like the band playing in the park on summer evenings and the fireworks on the Fourth, than with public utilities." And he offers the following suggestions toward extending its usefulness:

"When the farmer drops in to see what is the red bug that is eating his box-elder trees and what to do for it, or, rather, against it; when the editor telephones over for a map of Port Arthur for the afternoon edition; when the orator for 'Pioneer Day' finds there anecdotes of the early history of the town; when the boy who wants to study electrical engineering in his odd hours does not have to send $25 to a correspondence school for books the library ought to supply; when the village inventor can learn how many times before his non-refillable bottle has been patented; when the grocer's clerk comes over to see what brands of baking powder contain alum; when the mechanic can find out what horsepower he can get from a windmill above his shop; when the political junta adjourns from the drug-store to the library to see how much McKinley ran ahead of his ticket in 1896 in the fifth congressional district; when the young married couple look over the colored plates of a volume on the house furnishings à l'art nouveau ; when the labor leader comes in to look up English laws on the financial responsibility of trades-unions; when the mayor sends in for all the books on the municipal ownership of electric-light plants; when the clerk of the district court discovers in the files of the local paper an advertisement of a dissolution of partnership ten years ago then we can be sure that Andrew Carnegie has not wasted his money."

THE

AFTER-DINNER ORATORY IN AMERICA. HE after-dinner speech of America, says Mr. Daniel Crilly, an Irish journalist and reviewer, “ is a phase of intellectual effort that has no counterpart elsewhere." To reach the accepted standard of American criticism," it must have all the choice qualities of Sheridan's dialogue; it must be a gem in prose as one of Austin Dobson's masterpieces is in poetry; it must sparkle and effervesce like the higher brands of champagne." In Great Britain, where its fame is known, it is associated with "good stories, riant humor, graceful rhetoric, quaint conceits, and a genius for dexterously manipulating and alternating in a brief compass the lighter and graver shades of thought." That the post-prandial eloquence of America has won for itself a unique reputation, says Mr. Crilly (writing in The Nineteenth Century and After), is not surprising," when it is remembered that among those who have frequently responded to the toast-master's call in that country have been such men as Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Col. John Hay, Edmund Clarence Stedman, William Cullen Bryant, George William Curtis, William Dean Howells, Whitelaw Reid, Charles Dudley Warner, Joseph Hodges Choate, and Chauncey Mitchell Depew."

Mr. Crilly contrasts the after-dinner oratory in England and America, comparing the statistical dryness and gravity of the speeches at a London Chamber of Commerce dinner with a similar function in New York. Of the latter he says:

“The whimsical phrase, the inevitable anecdote, the fine literary turn of thought, are as common here as they are elsewhere. Those who think that the more delicate phases of art, literature, or philosophy should only be reverenced and expounded in an inner circle of superfine intellectual culture, far removed from the common skirts of the madding crowd, will doubtless regard it as insufferably incongruous that the following exquisitely happy wordpicture of the dainty genius of Washington Irving should grow to life at a mere Chamber of Commerce dinner. The fact remains, however, that Mr. George William Curtis spoke in this fashion of the genial author of 'The Sketch Book' at an annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York:

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He touched our historic river with the glamor of the imagination. He invested it with the subtle and enduring charm of literary association. He peopled it with figures that make it dear to the whole world, like Scott's Tweed, or Burns's Bonny Doon. The belated wanderer, in the twilight roads of Tarrytown, as he hears approaching the pattering gallop behind him, knows that it is not his neighbor; it is the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. It is not thunder that we hear in the Katskill on a still summer afternoon, it is the airy game of Hendrik Hudson's crew that Rip Van Winkle heard. The commerce of New York may penetrate every sea, and carry around the world the promise of the American flag and the grandeur of the American name, and return triumphant with the trophies of every clime; but over their leagues of wharves and towering warehouses and far-stretching streets can it throw a charm, as fresh to the next century as to this, such as the genius of literature cast upon the quaint little Dutch town more than two centuries ago, and upon the river which is our pride?'"

Mr. Crilly admits, however, that this specimen of Mr. Curtis's graceful eloquence is not altogether typical of American fer-dın ner oratory, in which, as a rule, "the vested rights of humor," and the full prerogatives of the cap and bells" obtain distinct recognition. To quote further:

"We have it on the authority of a brilliant master of the art of after-dinner speaking that platitudes are essential adjuncts to the construction of a speech, and, that being so, repetition, more or less, can scarcely be avoided. James Russell Lowell once enumerated what he called 'the ingredients of after-dinner oratory.' 'They are,' he said, 'the joke, the quotation, and the platitude; and the successful platitude, in my judgment, requires a very high order of genius.

Says Mr. Crilly in conclusion:

"The conviction may be allowed that in a country where life is driven at the highest pressure, where trusts, and 'rings,' and 'corners' must do anything but conduce to mental tranquillity, where the fear of any encroachment on the Monroe Doctrine must be perpetually 'getting on' people's nerves, it is well that the after-dinner speech has assumed the proportions of a national possession. So long as it manages to hold its own in that position the gaiety of the nation can never be altogether eclipsed."

THE

A SIGNIFICANT ARTISTIC EVENT.

'HE dedication of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, says the New York Outlook, is not only the most interesting recent event in the art world, but a significant indication of the rapid cultivation of the art spirit in this country, and of the rapid exten. sion of opportunities of art study. The new building is the gift of Mr. J. J. Albright to the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. The donor has further promised to contribute, for some time to come, the sum of $10,000 a year to be used for the purchase of works of art. The opening of the gallery was made the occasion of a loan exhibition of very unusual interest, including canvases of Franz Hals, Velasquez, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Rembrandt, among the earlier, and Manet, Monet, Courbet, Puvis de Chavannes, Millet, Rousseau, Whistler, and others among the later painters. Among those representing American art in this exhibition are Sargent, Thayer, Horatio Walker, Chase, Twachtman, Abbey, Miss Beaux, Homer Martin, and George Fuller.

The dedication exercises, which were attended by about ten thousand people, consisted of singing by a combined chorus under the leadership of Prof. Horatio Parker of Yale University; an address on "Beauty and Democracy," by President Eliot, of Harvard; and the reading of a poem by Mr. Richard Watson Gilder. The latter feature has been commented upon as peculiarly significant. Mr. Arthur Stringer, himself a poet and novelist, writing to the Literary Supplement of the New York Times, remarks:

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Surely it should not be lovers of poetry alone who will take an uncommonly keen delight not only in Mr. Richard Watson Gilder's poem read at the opening of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, but also in the fact that one of our living poets, and one of our most dignified and scholarly living poets, should actually be asked to participate in any such public service. Timely, too, as was the theme of Mr. Gilder's dedicatory ode, and sturdily beautiful as were many of his lines, the primary delight that lies in the poem itself is altogether overshadowed, with many, by that secondary pleasure which lurks in the longabandoned belief that the poet of to-day can, for even a moment, make himself of any possible civic use or of any possible national con

cern! Especially must we feel this way in America, swept as our republic now is by its 'Big Stick' and its turgid, anesthetizing tides of material prosperity-against which the inopportune minor versifiers have hitherto cheeped only thinly and plaintively from unread magazine page ends and from uncut author's editions. The poet, we all thought, was a good deal like a hermit-thrusli lost among the shafts and pulleys of a shoe factory or an armorplate foundry. He was pretty enough, in his place and in his way, but he had nothing to do with life or with the things that really counted.

'So even this momentary identification of what was once held the divinest of the arts with actual affairs and actual life carries with it some poignantly muffled touch of promise. It has a microscopic tinge of something Homeric about it, recalling older and nobler traditions. It shows that poetry, after all, is not as obsolete as antimacassars. It also serves to 'democratize' an art which, at first sight, appears to have been usurped and carried off (and well-nigh strangled) by idle-handed esthetes and self-immured dilet

"I venture to repeat that it seems highly significant that in a representative American city ten thousand representative American citizens, gathered together to witness the dedication of a public building, should not only listen to but vigorously applaud a poem serious in note and exalted in thought, written by an American poet of the twentieth century. If such things continue it may even come about that we shall no longer have to seek out a French St. Gaudens to make our municipal statuary for us and an English Stephen Phillips to write our successful tragedies for us. There is a market or two, and a market or two almost worth while, which we, with all our fiercely aggressive American energy, have not yet quite captured."

From Dr. Eliot's address we quote the following sentences:

"The provision of public museums, like this beautiful structure whose opening we commemorate to-day, is another means of educating the popular sense of beauty. For training the eye to the appreciation of beautiful compositions in color good paintings are necessary.

ness." Moreover:

The architects have shown the instinct which guides French architects in dealing with the building as part of a landscape. They have admirably fitted the gallery into a background of soft turf, abundant shrubbery, and clusters of trees, so as to produce the best effect, and to give not only a human interest to a charming landscape, to which both the blue of the sky and the green of the lake contribute, but to make the gallery a focal point of the entire scene. The architects have succeeded, therefore, in dealing with all the conditions so as to give to a building of very simple lines softness and elegance."

We here quote in full Mr. Gilder's dedicatory ode, “A Temple of Art":

Slowly to the day the rose,

The moon-flower suddenly to the night,

Their mysteries of light

In innocence unclose.

In this garden of delight,

This pillared temple, pure and white,

We plant the seed of art,

With mystic power

To bring, or sudden or slow, the perfect flower,
That cheers and comforts the sad human heart;
That brings to man high thought

From starry regions caught,

And sweet, unconscious nobleness of deed;

So he may never lose his childhood's joyful creed.
Tho years and sorrows to sorrows and years succeed.

Tho thick the cloud that hides the unseen life
Before we were and after we shall be,

Here in this fragment of eternity;

And heavy is the burden and the strife

The universe, we know in beauty had its birth;

The day in beauty dawns, in beauty dies,

With intense color of the sea and skies;

And life, for all its rapine, with beauty floods the earth.

Lovely the birds, and their true song,

Amid the murmurous leaves the Summer long.
Whate'er the baffling power

Sent anger and earthquake and a thousand ills

It made the violet flower,

And the wide world with breathless beauty thrills.

Who built the world, made man

With power to build and plan,

A soul all loveliness to love

Blossom below and lucent blue above

And new unending beauty to contrive.

He, the creature, may not make

Beautiful beings all alive

Irised moth nor mottled snake,

The lily's splendor,

The light of glances infinitely tender,

Nor the day's dying glow nor flush of morn-

And yet his handiwork the angels shall not scorn,
When he hath wrought in truth and by heaven's law-
In lowliness and awe.

Bravely shall he labor, while from his pure hands
Spring fresh wonders, spread new lands;
Son of God, no longer child of fate,

Like God he shall create.

When, weary ages hence, the wrong world is set right:
When brotherhood is real

And all that justice can for man is done,
When the fair, fleeing, anguished-for ideal

Turns actual at last, and 'neath the sun

Man hath no human foe;

And even the brazen sky, and storms that blow,
And all the elements have friendlier proved-

By human wit to human uses moved

Ah, still shall art endure,

And beauty's light and lure,

To keep man noble, and make life delight,

Tho shadows backward fall from the engulfing night.

In a world of little aims,

Sordid hopes and futile fames,

Spirit of Beauty! high thy place

In the fashioning of the race.

In this temple, built to thee,
We thy worshipers would be.
Lifting up, all undefiled,
Hearts as lowly as a child,
Humble to be taught and led
And on celestial manna fed;
So take into our lives
Something that from heaven derives.

FEAR AND DISTRUST OF BOOKS IN RUSSIA. FAVORABLE sign of the times in Russia is the appearance of a new edition of the famous novel, "What's to Be Done?" written half a century ago by Tchernishevsky, the radical publicist, critic, and reformer. The book was forbidden almost as soon as In it had seen the light, on account of its heterodox tendencies. spite of being suppressed it found its way into two English translations. Now it is republished without objection from the censor. This fact, in connection with other symptoms, and especially with the trend of the testimony and proposals submitted to the Kobeko Commission on the press laws and the desirable amendments of the same, is regarded by Russian journalists as an indication of a real and healthy change of governmental policy with regard to books and periodical literature, including the daily press. Writers have had a good deal to say lately about the "distrust of books" in Russia, the suspicion and presumption of injury and mischief with which the Government has viewed the product of the national intelligence plus the printing press. A writer in the St. Petersburg Novosti, in urging "trust in books," gives the following facts:

“Books, like newspapers, are divided into two classes: those that may be published without preliminary censorship, and those that must be submitted in advance, in manuscript, to the local censor. Even the first class is in reality subject to censorship, for several copies of each printed book must be handed to the censor before any are placed on the market. Whatever book he finds objectionable, politically or morally, he may declare illegal, confiscating or burning the whole edition. In the last forty years some censors, by keeping single copies of prohibited books for strictly private use, have accumulated libraries of the greatest value and intellectual interest to educated Russia, and some of these rare volumes command, at 'private sales' high premiums.

Instead of one censor, the writer and publisher have to reckon with no fewer than eight different censors representing as many official departments. Thus there are eight gantlets to run, seven tests to undergo, and each censor is a law unto himself, following his own notions, whims, and prejudices.

"Finally, when a book at last obtains the requisite authorizations and reaches the public, it encounters another array of difficulties. Libraries are not permitted to purchase and circulate even the censor-ridden books. Many, in fact, are expressly prohibited to the libraries, the idea being that what may be safe in the small circles of the well-to-do intelligent, may be dangerous in the hands of the 'people.'

"Hence those who can not buy books, or borrow them, are deprived of the privilege of reading some of the best and most progressive and stimulating productions of the present or the past. Many Russian classics are excluded from the libraries.

"It is stated in the St. Petersburg papers that the publishers have all demanded the complete abolition of the book censorship and full liberty to issue any book they see fit, subject to prosecution in court under general laws safeguarding public morality, order, etc. The commission proposed a compromise as follows: That all books should be passed upon by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and such as are found politically injurious or revolutionary should be turned over for examination and judgment to the National Academy of Science, a body of which almost every distinguished author is a member. The Academy, however, promptly declined this function. It declared that it could not undertake to apply official, political, governmental, or other non-literary and non-scientific and non-artistic standards to literature. It did not care to exercise 'police functions' and become a governmental agency. "The commission is expected to recommend liberal changes in the laws as to the press and remove the stigma of the 'distrust of books.""-Translation made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.