blessed saints St. Francis, St. Januarius, St. Nicholas, St. Theresa, and so on. Then I've got twelve different Holy Virgins, and lots of subjects that is Catholic or Protestant, and will do for the home or export market either. I pack 'em without frames in racks made on purpose, and they travel safe enough. The poor people abroad likes to have their patron saint; and then they vows a picture to the Virgin perhaps, and so they get stuck up in churches. I've heard tell that you can see 'em in most of the churches in Italy, as well as in Spain and Portugal. I used to send twenty to thirty gross to Oporto every year, but the vinedisease has very much injured that trade, and I don't send half as many now. However, I've had a new plate engraved, and got out a new picture, called 'La Vièrge O Grap;' that means the Holy Mother with the Grapes,' and I'm going to send a hundred gross of them out to Portugal to cure the vines of course I warrant 'em to do the business. He! he!" We commend Mr. Daubham's candid summary to the notice of book-making travellers and tourists, some of whom, if we are not very much mistaken, have dwelt with curious yet blundering minuteness upon these identical pictures, without conjecturing that in so doing they were describing the products of English industry. But we must leave the obliging Mr. Daubham to the prosecution of his trade, and take a look at another and more pretentious branch of equivocal art.

We have said that the home-trade in the productions of Mr. Daubham and his congeners, has of late greatly declined. This is not because the love of art has declined, but because it has become more ambitious-we can hardly say more discriminating. The glass-painting has at length been pretty generally discovered not to be the genuine thing; and oilpaintings on canvas are now extensively superseding the oil-paintings on glass. In the new trade, the Jews mingle very largely, and take the lead. They get up new frames

from old worn-out moulds, gild them with Dutch metal, clap a landscape of a good thumping size into them, and sell a pair of them for five-and-twenty shillings. They have a gorgeous appearance, and impart an air of luxury and grandeur to a poor man's cottage or a farmer's parlour, which pleases him none the less that it is barbarously out of keeping with all the rest of his domestic havings. The middle classes accept the same bait; and even in London, several thousands of such cheap wares are annually retailed. Nothing is more common in the streets of the suburbs than the spectacle of a wandering Jew, with a couple of pair of these tawdry pictures slung round his shoulders, back to back, and stopping to display them at positions favourable for effecting a sale. Both in London and in the country towns and villages, they are sold by the furniture-brokers in large numbers, and, like the paintings on glass, they too are exported-not to Catholic countries, where they would be a drug, but to the colonies, and especially to the emancipated negroes of the West Indies, who have a prodigious appetite for violent colours and gilding. The Jew-school of art is a peculiar one, and none can excel in it who have any conscientious scruples on the score of finish. About half-acrown the square yard is the usual tariff paid to the artistthe employer finding the canvas. It is by no means indispensable that the canvas be covered by the painter, as, for the majority of subjects, the work is half done to his hands when he receives it. The artists' colourman has to look to this. For moonlights, which are great favourites, he primes the cloth with a blueish lead-colour tint, which answers for the sky-for sunsets, he primes with a vivid orange-colour-for rocky scenes, with a dark umber-for snow-pieces, with pure white; and so on, to spare the painter unnecessary labour and expense of paint. It is found that an adept in this wholesale style of art, notwithstanding the immense area he has to get over before he has

earned a guinea, will make a comfortable thing of it, and win more money than many a studious artist whose works have gained the applause of the critics. These pictures are not painted one at a time-that would never pay. One pallet is made to suffice for half-a-dozen or so of the same pattern, the whole of which will be generally finished in the day's work. We have known the trade so brisk in speculating times, that two batches per diem were exacted by a well-known Jew exporter from an expert practitioner, whose earnings, while the pressure lasted, could scarcely have been less than ten guineas a week:

We have remarked in the preceding paper,* that to educate the eye is a slow process. Nothing, in fact, seems to make less satisfactory progress among the common people, than the power of distinguishing what is true and good in art, from what is false and vicious. In spite of Art-unions, of cheap illustrated books, and myriads of pictorial periodicals and newspapers, the very feeblest designs in which have more truth and value than whole cargoes of the chappictures above described, we see the people running after this palpable rubbish because it has the appearance of a bargain. The worst of it is, that the classes we generally term the uneducated, are by no means alone in this kind of preference the vile daubs above described are found not only in the dwellings of the poor and uncultivated, but, with broader frames and more luxurious gilding, in the houses of persons with some pretentions to fashion and taste. People who would not be seen abroad in an ill-cut coat, or a bonnet a month behind the mode, are yet content to gibbet their gross ignorance of the simplest principles of art on their own walls, for the information of all comers. We do not like to recommend the establishment of a censorship to take cognizance of pictures, or anything which would interfere with an Englishman's privilege of spending his money as he likes; * See "Commercial Art," p. 231.

but we may express our conviction, that the public would profit astonishingly by a despotism which should abolish at once the unprincipled manufacture of that which is not "goods," and the sale of which is a swindle, and compel the busy hands employed in it to work at some useful occupation.

It is to be feared that, notwithstanding all the remedies in the shape of Schools of Design, popular works on art, the flood of engravings and the deluge of illustrations weekly issuing from the press, we are really making but little progress in helping the great body of the community to the faculty of discriminating between a good and a bad imitation of nature or natural objects. A celebrated German critic, who wrote some years back on the state of the arts in this country, attributed what otherwise would have appeared to him the unaccountable insensibility of our populace to the æsthetic qualities of art, to some general defect either in the organs of vision or of the brain. We shall not accept any such theory. In our cities and towns, we have improved wonderfully since this dictum was promulgated; and if there has not been the same improvement among those living away from the centres of civilisation, it may be that it is because the same opportunities of comparison between what is really excellent and what is not so have not been afforded them. The establishment of provincial galleries and museums of art, and the throwing open of the numerous collections in private mansions, would place the villager in some respect. upon a level with the citizen. To a limited extent, this is already being done. Education, by the press and by the schoolmaster, must imbue our rising youth with a right appreciation of these advantages, so that all shall be eager to make the right use of them. When that is the state of things with us, the right feeling will spring spontaneously out of the right soil; and what is an instinct with the southern nations of Europe the ready perception of the

beautiful-will be an instinct also with us. We shall hope, in the face of the verdict above quoted, that the day will come, and that some of us will live to see it, when the queer schools of art described in this paper will be numbered with the fossilised facts of a vanished era, and their relics be regarded only as the monuments of a barbarous age.