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One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.

A SONG OF LIBERTY.

1. The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth :

2. Albion's coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint! 3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, France rend down thy dungeon,

and mutter across the ocean.

4. Golden Spain burst the barriers of old Rome;

5. Cast thy keys, O Rome, into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling,

6. And weep.

7. In her trembling hands she took the new born terror howling; 8. On those infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the atlantic sea, the new born fire stood before the starry king!

9. Flag'd with grey brow'd snows and thunderous visages the jealous wings wav'd over the deep.

10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurl'd the new born wonder thro' the starry night.

11. The fire, the fire is falling!

12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance; O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine; O African! black African! (go, winged thought, widen his forehead.)

13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.

14. Wak'd from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away;

15. Down rush'd, beating his wings in vain, the jealous king; his

grey brow'd councellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants: banners, castles, slings and rocks,

16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins on Urthona's dens. 17. All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded emerge round the gloomy king,

18. With thunder and fire: leading his starry hosts thro' the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,

19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast,

20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall

cease.

CHORUS.

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not!

For every thing that lives is Holy.

STAINED GLASS,

ANCIENT AND MODERN.

IN Keble College the other day, a friend remarked "We shall soon want a fresh set of Church restorations-to get rid of modern stained glass: "-and certainly the specimens before us justified the remark, a remark which brought to one's mind all the gross vulgarity of colour, feebleness of execution, poverty of design, and general inanity of scheme, all overshadowed by a strong tendency towards greenish-jaundice, which characterises ninety per cent. of all the glass now being made for cathedrals, churches, and alas ! also for houses.

I am far indeed from wishing to include Mr. Morris's work in this condemnation, and as he doesn't make anything like a tenth of what is produced, I leave room for some respectable work by other makers: but this does not even veil the fact that the production of this splendid item of the decorator's art has fallen into most incompetent hands, and has become a prominent source of de-decoration to our buildings, and of annoyance and vexation to all men of cultivated taste.

Anyone who has seen the cathedral and the church of S. Pierre at Chartres, knows something of the glory and delight of stained glass as it was and as it should be; and the descent from that to such glass as that at Keble College, all but inexplicable even in this age of all round art-degradation, brings one to the consideration of the present manner of its production and the class of workmen who produce it.

The mere fact of modern glass being drawn on paper only, even by such accomplished designers as Mr. Burne-Jones, and then transferred to glass by copyists,copyists whom one feels inclined to class as "clerks,”-points at once to an inevitable and fatal element of inferiority. What would a man think, having given an order for a picture to an eminent artist, when he discovered that the eminent artist had only drawn it in chalk on paper, and then handed it over to his "young man to copy it in colours on canvas !

Yet this is what is done' universally in stained glass; whereby we at once lose "touch," sparkle, breadth, and originality of handling, and get in exchange the mechanical monotony of the copyist ;-with this further mischief, that whereas the canvas or the panel may bear, and often with great advantage, the most minute detailing and stippling, as witness the work of Memling or Van Eyck, such work is fatal on glass, where translucency should be a prominent characteristic.

1 The only exception I know of is the excellent work of Mr. H. A. Kennedy.

4

How far this mechanical condition can be carried, and how utterly it can destroy every semblance of any quality which goes to make art, may be seen by anyone who will take the trouble to examine Munich glass-say in Glasgow cathedral.

The copyist delights in a hard, wire-like, mechanical line, and is proud of it: the artist avoids it as he would a plague. The copyist, if he has projection to express, knows no way but stippling the whole surface-now light may be, now dark, but everywhere stippled, suffering always from that most inartistic fault of not knowing where to stop the medieval artist, who always appears to have known and felt the qualities and capabilities of the material he was working in, saw at once that sparkle, translucency— life-disappear under excess of stippling, and so stopped very far short indeed of the whole surface-often didn't stipple at all.

Indeed, stained glass, theoretically, should be very much of the nature of a sketch by an able hand, vigorous in conception, strong in the handling of the principal forms, and slight as possible in mechanism of detail; practically, the glass should be variable in thickness, ribby, and full of air bubbles, so as to produce gradation of colour and enhance the jewel-like effect of its translucence: at least half of its surface should be left clean glass for the sun to shine through: no lines should be used and no "matting" more than are absolutely necessary to express the intention; and the lead, broad and plentiful, should supply the place of darks-formula which seem almost the exact contradictories of most of our modern productions.

Nor is this mischief of hard line and all-pervading "mat" the whole of the trouble. There is manifestly no use in drawing on glass with anything not permanent enough to stand the kiln at first and Jack Frost later; and no such materials being known to us but yellow silver stain and a blackish grey, best described as dirt, the copyist who has a figure with canopy or other background to draw on glass, practically covers the whole of his surface with dirt.

What then becomes of his colour? and so we see, in that apotheosis of bad art, modern German glass, that all deep and rich coloured glass has to be avoided, because when matted over it becomes black, and the maker flies to thin and gaudy tints, which even when covered with dirt, still look blue or green, violet or scarlet.

It is idle to speculate on what sort of men produced such windows as we see at Chartres and Evreux ;-did the designer himself draw them on the glass? were they ever designed on paper at all ? Traditional art was then in existence, and possibly very illiterate and homespun fellows in hodden grey drew them: but he would be a bold man indeed who should assert that with all our modern appliances and experience of the past into the bargain to guide us, we are at all in a way to reproduce such work: not only are our designers for the most part utterly below the level of their work, but if it is to be honourably called "art-work" at all, the copyist must be got rid of, and the designer must learn the perfectly simple art of staining and drawing on the glass.

Among the scores of young artists whom I have seen seeking work from decorators,

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only one has declared his ability to draw on glass, and one more his willingness to learn. To me it seems that there is room for one hundred.

Cannot our Royal Academy here find a new line for some of its ever over-crowding list of students? Not to mention bad pictures, too many good ones are painted, but, relatively speaking, almost no good glass is produced, and this for want of the very men who often can't sell their easel pictures when they have painted them!

JOHN ALDAM HEATON.

NESCIO QUÆ NUGARUM.

No. VI.

ST. MARY-LE-STRAND.

A PORTION of the cornice of the church of Saint Mary-le-Strand having fallen down, the church has been pronounced unsafe, and a movement is abroad for its demolition. This is no reason for its removal, it is only an excuse. The present lust to annihilate the masterpieces of Gibbs, witness the portico of Saint Martin's-in-the-Fields, as well as the masterpieces of Wren, is one of the surest revelations of the real state of the architecture of to-day. It is the natural thing for the age that could build-let us say for example Northumberland Avenue, to wipe out of existence the work of men the greatness of whose art was only the expression of the sincerity of their lives.

Northumberland Avenue is apparently a street of the most imposing architectural buildings, but really, with perhaps one exception, it consists of vast erections in which there is not the slightest trace of any feeling for art, or the least presence of any one architectural quality. Simplicity, proportion, composition, and subordination of parts are wholly wanting in these buildings; much less do we find in them any taste, delicacy, depth of feeling, or distinction; neither are they in any way related to-No, no they are very admirably related to the times.

One's first impulse in a matter of this sort is to write an elaborate appeal for the church of St. Mary-le-Strand; to point out that in some ways it is finer than the more celebrated church of St. Martin; to plead also for St. Olave, Jewry; for the faultless tower of St. Mary Magdalene, Knightrider Street; to point out that Wren and Gibbs had each of them an architectural style as real and distinct as the style of Palladio is from the style of Bernini: but what a farce this would be. The question whether these buildings are to stand or not, appears to rest entirely with men to whom there seems less chance of the qualities and worth of fine architecture dawning upon them, than there is of the other side of the moon revealing itself to future astronomers.

HERBERT P. HORNE.

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