390 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 



two trunks of trees. The white face and black feet of the 

 principal young lady, being the points of the design, are done 

 with as much care, not with as much dexterity, as an or- 

 dinary sketch of Dumourier's in Punch. The young lady's 

 dress, the next attraction, is done in cheap white and black 

 cutting, with considerably less skill than that of any ordinary 

 tailor's or milliner's shop -book pattern drawing. For the 

 other young lady, and the landscape, take your magnifying 

 glass, and look at the hacked wood that forms the entire 

 shaded surface one mass of idiotic scrabble, without the re- 

 motest attempt to express a single leaf, flower, or clod of 

 earth. It is such landscape as the public sees out of its rail- 

 road window at sixty miles of it in the hour, and good 

 enough for such a public. 



Then turn to the last the poetical plate, p. 122 : " Lifts 

 her lays her down with care." Look at the gentleman with 

 the spade, promoting the advance, over a hillock of hay, of 

 the reposing figure in the black-sided tub. Take your mag- 

 nifying glass to that, and look what a dainty female arm and 

 hand your modern scientific and anatomical schools of art 

 have provided you with ! Look at the tender horizontal flux 

 of the sea round the promontory point above. Look at the 

 tender engraving of the linear light on the divine horizon, 

 above the ravenous sea-gull. Here is Development and Prog- 

 ress for you, from the days of Perugino's horizon, and Dante's 

 daybreaks ! Truly, here it seems 



"Si che le bianche e le vermiglie guance 

 Per troppa etate divenivan ranee." 



I have chosen no gross or mean instances of modern work. 

 It is one of the saddest points connected with the matter that 

 the designer of this last plate is a person of consummate art 

 faculty, but bound to the wheel of the modern Juggernaut, 

 and broken on it. These woodcuts, for ' Barnaby Budge ' and 

 the ' Cornhill Magazine,' are favourably representative of the 

 entire illustrative art industry of the modern press, industry 

 enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last gleams in 

 the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob, rail- 



