Nature and Art, April 1, 1867.] 
REVIEWS. 
127 
slie will acquire through this republication. The authoress 
of “Public Morality and its Teachers,” “The Indigent 
Class,” “ The Fallacies of Memory,” “ The Shadow of 
Death,” “ A Lady’s Adventure in the Great Pyramid,” and 
“ The Fenian Idea,” has fairly won new laurels for her sex 
in an arena, where its triumphs have of late years been 
many and signal. In , extracting specimens of her grave 
and gayer moods, we face a certain small risk of being 
blamed for serving up rechauffdes ; but the majority of our 
readers will, we are sure, thank us for the following quo- 
tation from a delightful essay on “ The Fallacy of Memory,” 
to recognize which they must have read the New York 
Galaxy of May last. 
“ The conclusions to which this brief review of the 
failures and weaknesses of memory must lead us are 
undoubtedly painful. To be deceived a hundred times, and 
misled even in important matters, by a wrong estimate of 
our powers, seems less sad than to be compelled to admit 
that the powers themselves are untrustworthy. 1 To be weak 
is to be miserable,’ in this as in all other things ; but to 
find Memory weak is to be not only feeble in the present, 
but to lose our grasp of the past. That dear past ! the 
past by whose grave we are standing all our later life, 
is doubly lost to us if we must cover it up in dust and 
oblivion. To know that what we deem we recall so vividly 
is | but a poor, shifting reflex — hardly of the thing itself, 
only of our earlier remembrance of the thing — this is sad 
and mournful. Almost more terrible it seems to confess the 
fallaciousness of the great traditions of History, and in the 
waste of waters, over which we are drifting, to behold the 
barks of past centuries no longer stretching their sails in our 
wake, but growing hazy and spectral in the mist of doubt, 
till some we deemed the richest galleons in that mighty fleet 
fade from our eyes, and are lost for ever in impenetrable 
cloud. These things cannot be evaded or averted. On our 
generation of mankind has come the knowledge of an 
isolation, such as younger races never felt, and perhaps 
could less have borne. The sweet, childlike companionship 
with Nature, the reasoning beasts and birds, the half-human 
fauns and dryads and nymphs and river gods, the gnomes 
and sylphs and fairies ; the peopled sky of angels, and 
nether world of demons and of ghosts — all are gone from us. 
We are alone, we of this poor human race, so far as we have 
any knowledge or even definite fancy, among intelligent 
beings. Between us and our dumb brute slaves there is a 
gulf, which no longer is bridged over by any earth-born or 
heaven-descended race. Science, as she marches round us in 
wider and yet wider circles, leaves ever a hard and barren 
track behind her, on which no flower of fancy may bloom 
again. And at this hour she tells, or threatens to tell us yet 
more — that if we would know the parents from whom we 
came, whose Paradise-home yet seems the cradle of our 
infancy, we must retrace the world’s course not for six 
thousand years, but for ages of millenniums, and find them 
at last — not beautiful and calm, conversing in Eden with the 
sons of God — but simious-browed and dwarf of limb, 
struggling with the mammoth and the cave-bear in the 
howling wilderness of an uncultured world. Is not this 
enough ? Must we also relinquish those Elysian fields of 
History, where the great departed yet seemed to live in 
bowers of amaranth and never-fading fame ? Keeping the 
landmarks of the ages — the wars and the dynasties ; keeping 
the great heirlooms of wisdom, in books, in art, in temple 
and picture and poem and statue, must we relinquish those 
thousand lesser marks which have served to render History 
real and dear to us, and have brought the mighty Dead, not 
as silent ghosts and faintly-descried shades, but as living 
and speaking men before us ? Must we be content to 
know, that only the outlines of the ancestral pictures of our 
house are true, and all the colours which make them 
beautiful, retouched and falsified ? Perchance it must be 
so. Perchance the loneliness of human nature must needs 
be more impressed on us as science advances in the field of 
historical criticism, as in the fields of mythology and 
physiology. The past is becoming like a twilight scene in a 
mountain land, where the valleys are all filled with mist, and 
wood and waterfall and village spire are dimly shadowed. 
Only some snowy Alp, whose huge outline we recognize, 
towers into the upper air ; while the lights gleam here and 
there, from hearth and cloister and student’s cell, the rays of 
genius shining through the night of time. We are a 
thousand millions of men and women and babes living now 
upon earth ; but of those who are gone before on whose dust 
we tread ; and of those who may be dwelling now in the 
stars which glitter in our wintry sky, we know almost as 
much, — and that is not knowledge, but conjecture.” 
We cannot here find room to quote very pathetic passages 
we had marked in “The Diablerets,” piquant comicality 
from “ The Lady’s Adventure in the Great Pyramid,” or 
elegant satire from “The Humour of all Nations.” Suffice 
it for us to say that these sparkling pages prove their 
authoress to possess a depth of feeling, a keenness of 
observation, a store of knowledge, and a polished style, 
which place her, and will maintain her, if she so please, in 
the foremost rank of modern essayists. 
Papers on Picture Flaying at the National Gallery. By an 
Artist. Trubner & Co., 1867. 
The titles of this series of essays, “ Annibale Caracci,” 
“ Bravo Boxall ! ” “ Salvator Rosa,” “The Academician on 
Time and Dirt,” “The Dealer on Toning down,” “The 
Connoisseur on Process,” “ The Philosopher on Effect,” 
“ The Committee and the Job ” will afford an intelligent 
reader a notion of the tenor and spirit of the pamphlet 
they compose. Those who can relish a hearty diatribe may 
wile away an hour or two very pleasantly over the “Artist’s” 
pages, which, while they teem with abuse, in good set phrase, 
of the powers that be, and suggest to an unprejudiced 
mind the idea of a hobby-horse run wild, yet evince 
a considerable acquaintance with the subject, an honest 
abomination of jobbery, and a deep and fervid love of art 
that goes along long way to palliate excesses of expression. 
In the course of the last autumn several important pictures 
in the National Gallery were subjected, imder the direction 
of Mr. Boxall, Mr. Wornurn, and other employes, to a very 
ordinary process of cleaning, and, as those authorities 
fondly imagined, with very excellent results. The principal 
ones were a Salvator Rosa landscape, commonly called 
“ Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman,” formerly the pro- 
perty of Mr. Byng, and “ The Chateau of Stein,” the largest- 
landscape ever painted, by Bubens. When the Gallery was 
opened after the recess, we were there, and so it is to be pre- 
sumed was the author of the pages before us ; but oh ! in what 
different moods. While we, in Boeotian blissful ignorance, 
were applauding what we were pleased to think the suc- 
cessful exertions of the authorities to unveil the long- 
obscured beauties in their charge, there was present one, to 
whom (pictorially speaking) a cleaner is a nightmare, and 
dirt a religion ; and who muttering mentally, we may 
imagine, such phrases as “ desecration ! mutilation! spasm 
of destructiveness ! Vandalism ! noodles ! nincompoops ! ” 
straightway returned home to. give vent to his feelings in a 
protest, and a series of essays which are very instructive and 
interesting even to those who like ourselves differ toto ccelo 
with the main proposition he seeks to establish. 
On the subject of picture-cleaning he opens his case as 
follows : we extract the passage at some length, for though 
many of our readers have heard of the practice, its attendant 
risks, and of the controversy which rages periodically about 
the propriety or wrongfulness of it, few may be aware upon 
what the question hinges. 
“ On a picture that has been painted for centuries dirt to 
some extent must inevitably adhere ; but this, if the work 
has not been ignorantly covered with bad varnish or oil, 
will be so small in quantity as not to materially interfere 
either with the effect of the work or the pleasure and profit 
derivable from it by spectator or student. Still, the re- 
moval of this dirt would unquestionably be a gain, provided 
it were done without damage to the paint ; but ‘ cleaners ’ 
almost always take off, with the dirt, that delicate coat of 
colour by which the great painters imparted finish to their 
works, termed 1 glazing.’ Their process of painting was 
