reversed: while, besides the natural interests of home and family, (the most entire attention to which we cannot be supposed to wish to see suspended,) each has a large circle of pursuits and attachments to himself, which leave but little room for what they have in common.

These observations will answer the purpose of a more extended discussion of the subject, for which there is no room, if they suggest to any who are disappointed with the results, and consequently disposed to find fault with the administrators of our College system, that at present it is several ways deprived of opportunities of being as influential and beneficial, even in a low sense, as it might be. Admitting that the Colleges are bound to supply the needs of education, yet there are manifold and ample causes of inefficiency. For instance, the duties of the College tutor are sufficiently arduous, looking upon him in his own sphere, as an elder brother of a society superintending and guiding the thoughts and studies of others. Besides this, he has to do the work for his more advanced pupils, of the University Professor; and for others, in a majority of cases, that of the schoolmaster. The Scholarship (in the restricted sense of the word) at Oxford at least, is little, if at all, in advance of the public schools. A boy who has been among the ten or twelve best scholars at any of the latter, need do little more than keep himself from falling off to satisfy the requisitions for the highest place in the class list. Perhaps it is as well, that, for all who do not make this their particular line, the school should do all that is sufficient; that the precious time at College may be given to other studies. But how is it with the pass-men? The majority of these must be taught with infinite labour and weariness "the small Latin and less Greek" which is requisite to secure a testamur. Men are not plucked for mistakes in these, which would not be thought deserving of punishment in any average boy in the upper half of a public school. Men, when they are sent up to College, ought not to want to have their grammar taught them; unless the school has done its duty in preparation, how can the College carry on the process of instruction? It is as if we had engaged the services of Sir. F. Chantrey for a limited time, and were then to request him to hew a statue from the rough block, instead of reserving his genius to finish off and give life to the work prepared to his hand by inferior artists.

Again, as to another charge; that of expensiveness. It is allowed on all hands that great faults exist. Yet it is also clear that the necessary expenses do not admit of much diminution: what are complained of are those which fashion, and folly, and the love of keeping up appearances entail. Yet is the College blameable for all this? Young men come up at an age when their habits and tastes are in a great measure formed, with more money and liberty than they have before known, perhaps for the first time in their life emancipated from entire supervision, to a place where credit is freely given, and where are the youth of the aristocracy, with their handsome allowances, to set a fashion which it may require great moral courage to resist. All that can be said is, that here an extravagant young man can, within certain limits, be almost as expensive as anywhere else. Colleges are frequently blamed, when parents have been uniformly weak and indulgent, and

long before the pupil approached their walls, vice and extravagance have made formidable inroads upon the purity of the youthful heart.

But while we protest against the unfairness of the clamour which would lay the whole blame at the door of the Colleges, it cannot of course be asserted that all is done that might be done, and that a great deal may not fairly be demanded at their hands. This is doubtless felt by very many who have a share in their government, and efforts are surely being made to remedy the inefficiency that all allow in some degree to exist. No offence can surely be given by saying, that improvement to be permanent and real must begin with those highest in rank, whose example must lead in a right or a wrong direction, and cannot be merely without influence either way. However, to give advice and suggest reforms would ill become us, nor need we here discuss the schemes which from so many different quarters have been proposed to meet our urgent needs.

Meanwhile we have wandered far from Mr. Whytehead; to whose volume we may now return with double pleasure, as a most consolatory proof, that, maimed of much of its natural influence, as we believe it to be, our Collegiate system has still in it far more than the elements of the most healthy life, and may still, if rightly used and appreciated, produce us in our time of need men who may be worthy successors to those venerable names whose memory is associated with it. Who indeed can doubt it? Even where circumstances are most against him, when he is likely to meet with little sympathy with equals, and no encouragement or guidance from superiors, the dutiful son of the Church will be alive to the quiet influences of the place, and be led by the very buildings and forms around him to appeal from the present to the past. Speaking of such a case, Mr. Whytehead says:

"The College will have habitually in his mind such a distinct personality, independent of its living members, that its voice will be to him what that of the Church has been to many a gentle soul in the English or Greek or Latin branches of it, in an age of degenerate faith or practice. He will appeal from the degenerate living representative to the undying original which it represents, and so will acquire by degrees the important power and habit of seeing the ideal in the actual, of recognizing and paying homage to it even under its present imperfect development. Nor is it to imaginative and susceptible minds alone that the voice of the spirit of antiquity is thus audible, breathing throughout the whole fabric of our Collegiate Institutions. He that will listen may hear it. The reverence paid to founders, reaching with pious duty to their sepulchres and their kindred, the commemorations of benefactors, the adherence to ancient costume and ceremonials, are all retrospective in their character, and are peculiarly suited to act upon and affect a youthful mind, as being in strong contrast to its own naturally prospective disposition, just as

"Then twilight is preferred to dawn,

And autumn to the spring."-pp. 20, 21.

We need not dwell upon the many similar influences which the reader of this little book will find so pleasingly handled: the daily chapel service, with its manifold importance, whether in the Family Prayer of the Society," or as security that "all studies are required to wait as handmaids on that queen-mother of learning, --the

:

ology," (p. 61,) and are every day to be solemnly blessed and consecrated before they are entered upon the value of friendships formed under such a system, and hallowed and knit together by such ties, whether between fellow-students of equal age, or more than all, to those who have been so blessed, such as was that which Walton has so beautifully described between Hooker and his pupils, Sandys and Cranmer. (See p. 136.) These and others like them cannot be adequately described, but must be felt to be rightly prized: and they are, in degree, as open to the student of the present day, as of any other.

Certainly no one who thinks on the subject will deny, that at this crisis we are much in need of the character of the Christian Student. His office is well defined and most important; and, if the consent of most thinking men be any true augury of what is coming upon us, it is one on which great calls are likely to be made. As one controversy after another arises, and the question becomes no longer one about individual portions of doctrine, but of the authority of the Church, the Commission of her Ministers, or, as it seems not least likely, the Inspiration of Scripture itself, we shall naturally look for the defence of the faith, not to an episcopate and clergy overwhelmed with active duties not too large for five times their number, but to the men who in the quiet retirement of our Colleges have given themselves up to the pursuit of learning as the handmaid of Piety, the sworn servant of Religion and Truth. The Church is the mother of all knowledge: in her system there must be a place for every discovery of human intellect: she must find a name and an office for every thing. Wherever the mind of man wanders, she must be at hand to interpret the strange forms and new sights which bewilder it, that it may not think, in its wayward pride, that it has passed over the borders of its Father's Kingdom. May her sons be ready to serve her in whatever duty she may require at their hands!

REMARKS ON THE APPLICATION OF COLOUR TO THE INTERNAL DECORATION OF CHURCHES.

THE use of colours in the internal decoration of churches has been so completely neglected, for a long time past, in this country, and the traces of it have been so frequently obliterated,-be it by the usual action of time and the violence of mistaken zeal in days past, or by the ignorance and neglect of later times,—that it has become a matter of grave doubt with many, whose taste in other departments of art has been unquestioned, whether colours form a legitimate means of heightening the effect or increasing the splendour of ecclesiastical structures. Still, it seems unquestionable, that art is so far and then admirable when it reproduces natural objects as they are, or appear to us; and if this be so, it is not easy to account reasonably for the exclusion of colours from bearing their legitimate part in the highest use to which art is, or can be, directed-the dedication of its best efforts to the attempt to

worship, in the beauty of holiness," the Giver of all Good with the best of His creatures. If the material temples in which we and our fathers have worshipped, have ever been held in some sort to symbolise the natural world which passeth away, and, even in their details, this meaning may be plainly discerned, with what show of reason can we deny in them a place to colour, which we assert and demand for the glorious forms we love to contemplate and hope to multiply-wherewith our forefathers strove to symbolise the Infinity of GoD: or for the resources of heavenly melody, the perfect tones of human voices and the artful harmony of instruments, going near to realize the grateful worship of the Psalmist," singing" and "giving praise" "with the best member" that he had; the minstrels going before and the singers following after? But besides the analogy of nature, which delights the eye by harmony and brilliancy of colour, more palpably than by the adjustment of proportions, and more universally and equally than she gratifies any other sense, and besides the weight which the universal practice of antiquity must have, there is a higher ground on which to rest the employment of the pencil in the internal decoration of public buildings, and more especially of churches. Surely if the principle of the poet"Segniùs irritant," &c., be generally admitted and acted on when we decorate our national buildings with the painted lessons of our national history, for the purposes, not alone of commemoration, but also of encouragement and example, it were inconsistent to exclude from churches, the lively images of the Church's history, the multiplied emblems of her Faith? This it was, the instruction of the unlearned and edification of all the faithful, which led the Great Gregory to enjoin the use of painting on the Apostle of our nation, and which formed the subject of the reiterated canons of our national and provincial synods, for century upon century. It cannot be said that the increased enlightenment of the age renders such means unnecessary. It is written that the poor shall never perish out of the land," and, as long as the world stands, there will be those whom no language printed in books can reach of such, the Church is the very home, nor will she be content to neglect so simple and so efficacious a means of instructing them. The mother alike of rich and poor, she neglects neither: addressing herself to the great and wise with the contrivances and subtilties of a refined and intellectual age, she yet does not neglect the poor and simple, but, as her especial charge, will cherish them and feed them with the same food that nourished them of old. If it be thought that such means as these are suited only for a missionary church, who shall say how far on that very ground they are needful to us now? That there may be danger in the indiscriminate use of æstheticks in the service of religion is, of course, true; but what danger can compare with the danger of godlessness shrouded in the thick wrappings of a grovelling ignorance? Surely every means which holds out a hope of penetrating it, and awakening a sense of the reality of unseen things in those whom it holds enwrapped, should not be neglected without much fear and misgiving.

The subject of decoration must embrace fresco, distemper and oil painting, mosaic, inlaying, (or pietre dure,) enamel, encaustic, stained

glass, tapestry, and embroidery, and each would form a very profitable subject for study. We can only hope to speak of a few instances of works of this kind, very cursorily.

We shall, of course, not look for many traces of such decorations in the earliest ages of the Church, when the most we might reasonably anticipate would be casual, and, perchance, not always appropriate, decorations of buildings, for the most part unconsecrated and not originally designed for sacred uses; but, nevertheless, there are not wanting traces of such decoration, especially in the long interval of calm preceding the last persecution. But when the storm of persecution had passed over, and Constantine had revived the hopes of Christendom by the publication of his edicts, churches rose on every side, of fair and lofty proportions, and glittering within with gold and gorgeous decorations. Eusebius, Procopius, Paulinus, and S. Jerome, especially, abound with descriptions of the splendour of mosaic and lacunary work. And, later in this century, Paulinus, Bishop of Nola in Campania, mentions paintings of Saints and Martyrs in his church. According to S. Gregory Nyssen, the floor of the church of S. Theodore represented the acts of that Saint's Martyrdom. Of the mosaic placed by Justinian in the church of S. Sophia, much remains to this day, and affords no mean specimen of the skill applied to this end, under the auspices of that magnificent monarch. Among the earliest specimens of coloured decoration, we may mention here, the pictures, in mosaic, of our LORD and twenty-four of the Fathers, which adorn the Basilica of S. Paul, (above the catacomb of S. Lucina, at Rome,) a church, founded by Constantine, commenced about the year 386, by Valentinian, and finished by Honorius. "Concerning these," says Baronius, "Pope Hadrian writes in his letter to Charlemagne, (de Imaginibus,) that they were placed there by Pope Leo the Great." Damp and time have considerably impaired the colours of them. Aringhi also in his laborious compilation, "Roma Subterranea," gives two drawings of subjects, "coloribus expressa," taken from the portico of the ancient Basilica of the Vatican, long since destroyed: the original copies are preserved in the archives of the Vatican. The first of these represents the bodies of SS. Peter and Paul being cast into a well, which Aringhi elsewhere mentions as still existing in the catacomb of S. Sebastian; the second represents the exhumation of their remains for the purpose of solemn interment. This portico has been attributed to Pope Martin V., but seems of higher antiquity. Aringhi (who wrote in 1650) says it was held by learned men to have been built a thousand years or more before his time. But the most interesting remains of

See Lactant. de Mort. pers. c. 13. Gildas de ex. Brit. Optatus, lib. ii. + Mede gives an extract from a dialogue (commonly ascribed to Lucian), in which, in mockery, he brings in one Critias, who says he was persuaded to become a Christian by some who, to this end, brought him to their place of assembly, which he describes as an "upper room whose roof was overlaid with gold, (not unlike to what Homer makes Menelaus' house to have been,) "but I could see no Helena there, but, on the contrary, a company of persons, with their bodies bowed down, and pale countenances."

Euseb. de Vit. Const. lib. iii, c. 36. Procop. de Ædif. lib. i. Paulin. Ep. 12, ad Sacrum. S. Hieron, lib. ii. in Zechar. viii.; idem ad Nepot. ep. 2, etc. Vide Bingh. viii. c. 8, also Clem. Alex. 2, iii. Pædag.