this picture, of which there is a duplicate, from the hopelessness of it, as well as from its want of colour, one of the most depressing that he ever painted. Of course one might regard it in another light the wheel of fortune is sometimes used as a decorative symbol in Christian architecture; it is so in the western front of the noble church of San Zeno, at Verona, and there, it would signify the uncertainty of human prosperity, but as it consists there as part of a Christian building, one feels there is a higher power behind it, which can, and does, over-rule the turns of fortune. But in the picture the tall, immobile figure of the woman, with her set, sad face, and powerful arms, suggest a fixed and relentless destiny.

In all of this artist's works, one feels there is an inner thought lying, the presence of this thought is part of the interest of the work, it adds to it even to those who have not recognised it. It has been often said that all art is symbolic, it is highly so with this artist. His genius does not drive him out into the open air, to paint the broad smile of Nature, he paints and thinks in his studio, visited there by his conceptions; he is exquisitely true to Nature when it comes in his way to paint her myriad forms, but Nature alone is not the inspirer of his pencil, for he is not the painter of facts just as they were and are, but of myth and legend, as he sees them in his imagination, in the world of creative thought.

But there is one form of his art I have not as yet even touched on. Those who have been to Rome or Ravenna, cannot fail to be struck by the very old mosaics which adorn the tribunes and other parts of the churches there; much is gone, but enough is left to give one a fair knowledge of the fitness and beauty of this form of decoration for churches. The question of wall-decoration has been solved in Italy as it has been solved in no other country; these mosaics seem in their simple grandeur to express the simplicity and eternity of the Christian religion. The design executed for the American Church at Rome has those stern and rigid lines which form so essential a part of mosaic; and the figures are quite as impressive as any that ancient art has given us. They stand around, and in the dome of the apse, they attract and arrest the eye, and speak of that immortality which one loves to associate

with our faith. The central figure, which must represent our Lord, is seated; around, and behind His person, wings appear to be folded, their colour is dusky; the face is set and firm, with wide-open eyes. One feels that this is not meant as a representation, but more as a symbol of the Divine Being. So also is it with the angels, who stand ranged on either side of Him. They are tall and majestic figures, standing at intervals, with glorious wings, and I think spears in their hands; they suggest divine calm and dignity. To these sentinel-looking figures a sense of movement and life is given by a blue and rushing river circling the base of the dome at their feet. The waters of this River of Life flow in a splendid wave-like motion, full and abundant, and free. I question if ever in early mosaic work there is to be found such a "River of God, full of water." It is a pity that there is not more of this kind of mosaic work to be seen in our churches; when it is seen, it is generally of a very petty and indifferent kind, the range of our symbolic art being of the narrowest, and poorest kind. Indeed, in Rome I was surprised to see how Italian artists when left to themselves could degrade this beautiful means of decoration. In the church of San Lorenzo, where the late pope lies buried, the walls of the chapel in which his tomb stands, are inlaid with precious mosaics; but there is nothing but the costliness and bright newness of the material used to commend it to our taste. The design consists of the arms of the various bishoprics of the church, and below these is the likeness of a pale blue hangingthe folds, and inequalities and fringes of which, are represented with the usual vacant skill of the modern Italian designer.

There are many other mosaics executed by this artist, as well as a number of beautiful stained-glass windows, rich in colour, and full of the same mystic charm and poetic feeling which we know and love so well in his pictures.

I am sure my readers have found out by this time that I have given a most emphatic affirmative to the question-so often asked

"Is Burne-Jones amongst the great painters?" and that I not only place him amongst the great painters, but claim for him a permanent place amongst the greatest of English painters.

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CLOUDLESS, shiny, hot winter day. Not at the Antipodes either, nor in a corner of the earth far distant beyond our isles, but in Europe, within a thirty hours' journey of London, on the northern shore of the blue Mediterranean, in that God-favoured paradise, the Italian Riviera.

The sea looked like a sheet of bluish cinquecento glass. Scarcely a ripple danced on its surface. The limpid waters took their colour from the unflecked deep blue of the sky, and through them the rocks and boulders at the bottom shone like blocks of topaz and amethyst. The waves slowly churned themselves into an opal foam, of barely a handsbreadth, against the pebbly shore. Further out, all was still and placid. The sea seemed to have caught the spirit of the folk who inhabited its shores, and to be as lazy as they.

About fifty or sixty yards from the tide line, a row of tall red-leaved eucalyptus trees sheltered a score of white-washed and green-blinded houses against the glare of the sun. They were the outposts of the thriving little village, Andoletto, that lay snugly hidden amid the olive trees, and the locust trees, and the fig trees, and the palms on the hillside, about a mile and a half from the shore. On the land side of the group of houses,

a life-size figure of St. Paul, richly apparelled in a coat of blue, red, and yellow paint, with gilt sandals and a gilt halo, smiled in wooden benevolence from the recess of a gaudy shrine, and gave its name of San Paolo to the station of the railway, which gleamed, in two long streaks of steel, twenty yards or so behind the line of the eucalyptuses. A well-kept road led from San Paolo to Andoletto, now between the grey stone walls of vast olive orchards, then skirting fields, dotted all over with fruit trees, where vines trailed from tree to tree, here and there passing the beautifully scrolled mediæval iron gates of gentlemen's residences, where the wayfarer obtained a glimpse of the wealth of foliage and glory of blossom that revelled within, until it reached the hillside, where it climbed slowly, and in the lazy fashion of the country folk, by easy, zig-zag stages up to the village itself.

Andoletto consisted of one steep, winding street, whence various little turnings dashed out mountainwards, to end, each and every one of them, not many yards away, some at the entrances of olive orchards, others at the arched gates of houses nestling against the hillside. Who built Andoletto, and when it was built, no man might know. The houses looked as if they had been constructed at all sorts of periods and in all sorts of fashions, and had been tumbled pell-mell against that spur of the Maritime Alps. That big, grey stone building with the legend Hôtel d'Angleterre

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over its vast portals, with its iron-barred windows on the lower floors in such curious contrast with the flaring green blinds of the upper stories, with its quaintly carved stone copings and its little marble fountain in the wall, was surely built in the proudest days of the Holy Roman Empire. Everything about it was solid and heavy, and yet the artistic hand of its fashioner was everywhere traceable. Right next to this relic of mediæval architecture stood a wineshop brightly distempered in a salmony pink, and spick and span in its newness of construction and ornamentation. Alongside of it, another, though crumbling with age, bore the unmistakable traces of the Italian Renaissance period. Then came others, ornamented with imitations of Etruscan frescoes and smothered with

climbing roses. Then hovels, simply masses of stones mortared together, with a door here and a glassless window there, the roofs broken and badly mended, so that one might have wondered how they came to own a place among their gaudy neighbours. And so on-here and there a high wall breaking the line of houses, richly adorned with the green of trailing creepers, and edged on the top with the warm colours of the blossoming cactus and myriads of roses. And between them all, and overshadowing them all, the dark verdure of the broad-leaved fig trees and the mellower and paler colour of the gracefully sweeping palm branches, the whole backed by the silvery green mass of the olives which clothed the mountain side.

That was Andoletto. It glowed in the warm winter sunshine like a mass of rich, luscious, ripe fruit in its leafy basket of hills. And on this Tuesday in February, 1887, it was gayer, brighter, gaudier, flightier, than its wont. The air rang with merry voices. Shouts of laughter and staves of song pealed everywhere. In the street none but brightly-coloured garments. The dark-eyed, berry-brown faced lasses had abandoned their usual skirts of blue and their handkerchiefs of red, and had donned bodices of velvet and skirts of silk. Not a peasant there who did not boast a bunch of manycoloured ribbons and a silken sash of various hues. Even doublet and hose could be seen here and there, and the garb of ancient Piedmont. Monks without tonsure walked arm in arm with flower girls who might have stepped out of a picture by Paul Veronese. And all

were laughing, shouting, all were pelting one another with confetti, till the roadway was covered an inch deep with the grey particles. For was it not Shrove Tuesday? Was it not the last day of the Carnival? And would not Lent come to-morrow with its sackcloth and ashes and its penances? Not a farm labourer there who had not saved up throughout the year for that one day. And on that one day they all mingled with one anotherneither high nor low then. King Carnival had levelled all distinctions, and reigned supreme in his merry-making.

Nearly at the top of the long, winding village street, one side of the road was skirted by what might have seemed a wall nearly twenty feet high, but what actually was the side of the mountain, cut out of the solid rock supported by masonry, and overgrown by a sheet of ivy and other creepers. Nigh on a score feet above the roadway behind this sheltering barrier, ran a wild garden in all its beauty of early blossom and rich foliage. Giant geraniums, laden with bunches upon bunches of crimson flowers, marguerite bushes, standing as high as a tall man, carpets of dainty violets, roses white, and roses red, roses pink and roses yellow by the myriads, all wrestled with one another in beautiful confusion. Nature had been bounteous indeed. A winter paradise, such as many an artist dreams of, but not often finds.

Some three score yards, at the back of the wall, stood a straggling building, still glowing here and there with the sheen of the marble which its original builders had lavished upon it, but fallen into dire decay. There was a horse-shoe flight of steps which might have been the glory of the palace, but it was broken, and with one side smothered by a veil of greenery, it looked like a portion of a ruined Greek shrine. The colonnaded front was copied from an Ionian temple, and the green blinds and striped awnings, although necessary to the dweilers in the place, seemed sadly out of keeping with the architectural grandeur.

Two women were seated by the side of the wall, which, though twenty feet above the roadway, was on the inside but three or four feet high. A young woman and an old one. The young woman might have been termed handsome, had not suffering blanched her face, and drawn and angularised her once rounded features. The large eyes were dark, and glittered with a sickly lustre. The lips, though

full, were pale. Grief had written its mark upon that woman's face, and stamped out the glow and bloom of youth. The elder woman had a quiet face, sharp and stern. She looked the picture of a Puritan matron in her grey woollen gown, her black mittens, and her white cambric cap. A child was playing on the greensward by their feet-a ruddy, robust, healthy, dark-eyed, baby boy of three. Whatever privations had befallen the mother, the child had not suffered from them. He was a straightlimbed, chubby little fellow crowing with delight as he plucked daisies from the sward and violets from the border, and held them up in childish glee after each successful raid upon the flowery prey.

The women were looking down into the street, and upon the throng of maskers and merrymakers, that flowed past them mountainward and then ebbed back again towards the sea. They were all pelting one another with the confetti, but something stayed their hands when they looked up at those two faces, and not a grey pellet reached the two women on the top.

"The English lady," the dark-eyed lads whispered to their sweethearts, "the kind English lady." She seemed to be so far removed from their revelry that they left her at peace as one not understanding their ways nor their habits. And well they might, for while money was still plentiful, before the awful time had come when Gerald Theyme had taken to gambling and to drinking-to flinging his patrimony and his earnings into that insatiable gulf at Monte Carlo-Linda Theyme had been a very Lady Bountiful in that Italian village. No poor woman had suffered there without Linda Theyme's practical sympathy and help. No child was hungry but had had his wants relieved by Linda Theyme. Old men nigh their death had blessed her, and young women on their youthful sick couches had found her a tender and gentle nurse. Therefore, they all looked up at the pale face of the English lady, the face upon which suffering and distress were so plainly writ, and they whispered to one another words of sympathy and passed on, to be merry and glad, though before these two English women they seemed nigh ashamed to show it.

Linda cast anxious glances along that roadway and scanned the sea of faces with burning eyes. The needle-work upon which she was engaged dropped from time to time upon her lap, and she

looked plaintively at her husband's mother, who sat by her side knitting with unruffled equanimity.

Her hands fell listlessly by her sides at last, and she heaved a long sigh.

"I can't see Gerald," she said. "The train must have been in more than an hour, and he is not here."

"Don't you trouble yourself, my dear," the old woman replied. He'll come back soon enough. When he's lost every penny, and hasn't a rap to stake at those cursed tables, he'll come back to try to see if there is anything left that he can sell."

The young woman searched the crowd below with her eyes.

"I wish he would come back," she cried in an agony. "It's so terrible to leave me in such suspense. I wish we had never left England. I wish we had never come here."

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"Right, my child," replied the elder woman. I heartily say 'Amen' to that. If we had never left England you and he would not have come to this. I don't mind it for myself, because I am an old woman, and the little that I want I am sure to get, but you-you were accustomed to plenty, and you're often hungry. You were accustomed to luxury, and you've to scheme and to make shift to find food for your child. And all through that villain of a boy of mine."

"Don't call him harsh names, mother," said the younger woman. "He'll see his folly some day, and then we shall be happy again."

See his folly !" sneered Mrs. Theyme. "Never while he's here. There's a curse on the land. There's a curse on the people—a lewd people-a lot of Sabbathbreakers and worshippers of images, the women shameless in their gaudery, and the men a lot of foreign Papists that can't even understand an honest Englishwoman when she speaks to them. I've no patience with them. There'll be a judgment come over them for this ungodly fooling, you take my word for it."

"I can't blame them," rejoined Linda. "Life is so short, and we're so often unhappy. They're poor enough, God knows, and after all, it's better that they should spend their money in a little innocent fooling than to fling it away as poor Gerald does."

"It's Satan and his works both ways," the old woman burst out; "gambling and masquerading, both godless,-one as sinful as the other, though the one is

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