this sad truth-teller betrayed to her the ravages of disease, she seems to have lost all hope and spirit, took to her bed permanently, allowed no light in the room but the lamp of a teakettle,' and actually took things in through the curtains without suffering them to be withdrawn. This recals another death-bed scene -that of the charming Mrs. Oldfield, Pope's Narcissa:

"Odious in woollen! 'twould a saint provoke." Were the last words that Narcissa spoke. "No; let a charming chintz and Brussels lace Wrap my cold limbs and shade my lifeless face;

One would not sure be frightful when one's dead

And, Betty, give this cheek a little red."'

Unfortunately, a letter for Lord Coventry was brought in to her, the handwriting of which she recognized as that of her sister. She opened it without scruple, and read in it a touching lament over her own piteous case; the duchess bewailing her hard fate in not being able ever to see her again, and plainly considering her case as hopeless.

The effect on the wretched beauty was almost fatal. The doctor rushed to the room, and found her almost dying. Through the rest of the day and night she passed from one fainting fit to another. Her attendants thought she had not an hour to live, and hurried expresses were sent for Lord Coventry, who was to arrive the next night.

On the 1st of October she died. That Walpole really felt her death -as much, indeed, as that water

colour Voltaire could feel the loss of any living thing-is evident from his letters. The charming countess is dead at last,' he wrote, five days after her demise. The Reverend Mr. Mason tuned his genteel lyre to some desponding chords for the occasion.

Yes, Coventry is dead! Attend the strain,
Daughters of Albion: ye that, light as air,
So oft have tripped in her fantastic train,

With hearts as gay and faces half as fair,
For she was fair beyond yon brightest bloom,
This Envy owns, since now her bloom is
fled.'

Lord Bolingbroke, known to his wild friends as 'Bully,' had affected a sort of tendresse for the Countess; and it is said that when news was brought to Newmarket of her death, he acted a burst of well got up emotion, and left the room, says spiteful Horace, to hide not his crying but his not crying. But the mob,' as the same authority usually styled the broad, bold citizen element of the British people, held by her to the last, and ten thousand people witnessed her funeral.

Old Mr. Gunning, who had risen with his daughter's fame, and had got into good society, was seen by Lord March, two or three years afterwards, at a grand masquerade. He wore a running footman's habit. with Lady Coventry's picture hung at his button-hole, like a cross of St. Louis.' This is the last appearance of John Gunning, Esq., of Roscommon. By that time, no doubt, the rest of the world had forgotten her.

IN

engraving and brief notice of the large allegorical fresco of The Railway,' painted by Herr Echter, at the end of the great hall of the Munich Railway Station. We now add the companion fresco-The Electric Telegraph.'

When Mr. Watts offered to paint frescoes in the hall of the Euston Terminus for the mere cost of the materials, his offer, as we have seen, was blandly though peremptorily declined. Had a proposal been made to the directors of the North Western, Great Western, Great Eastern, or any other great line, to decorate the walls of their head station with huge allegories, like these of Herr Echter, and to pay a fair price for them, one can appreciate the surprise with which they would have received the proposition, and the suspicion they would have felt of the sanity of the proposer. But if, under some malign influence, they had entertained the project, what alarm and indignation would have seized the opposition at the next meeting of the shareholders, and with what noisy unanimity would the wasteful and iniquitous scheme have been summarily spurned!

But, not to resort to improbable instances, it seems to have almost become one of the understood, if not 'written, canons of accepted critical results-those results which are such a comfort to quiet common-sense folk-that Allegory is hardly suited to our practical, matter-of-fact, iron age, and that if, out of consideration to honoured precedents, it may be properly enough allowed a place on the walls of a mediaval palace of legislature, it would certainly not be justified in invading the domains of the railway or telegraph. In ancient Greece and Rome, the personages of the mythology-whether deities or attributes-were at least actualities. They were mingled with every one's thoughts of earth and sea and sky, associated with their ordinary everyday actions, the agents of all extra

ordinary events. They were believed in by the great mass of the people, even when the more cultivated were becoming indifferent, if not sceptical.

With us, the heirs of all the ages, the denizens of this iron-traversed half century, these mythic beings are merely shadows of the past. We know all about them, and care nothing for them. We have outgrown allegory. A little innocent symbolism is just tolerable-as a sort of universal stenography, a matter of convenience-for the outside of a county court, or the seal of an insurance office, the top of a column, a tombstone in a cemetery, a painted church-window, or a national memorial in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's. There Hope may have her anchor, Justice her balance, St. George his dragon, St. Catherine her wheel, St. Peter his keys; and if they are smooth-faced, neat-limbed, classic-looking figures in sculpture, or grim, gaunt, lanky, and mediæval in church-work, we know they are orthodox, and are content.

Content, that is, for such strictly official art; for in all our public works whether architectural or monumental we are a patient, much enduring, peace-loving, though grumbling people. But outside this official art we are more exacting, and there we resolutely avert our face from allegory. We have come in every branch of art to demand more reality to speak plainly, more meaning and more truth. But whether, in order to attain that, it is necessary to abolish allegory altogether, is a matter which our artistic friends and guides would do well to consider. Allegory is but the higher poetry of representative art. It is in no sense dependent on the pagan's worn-out creed. seeks to convey a larger sense by simpler means,' to utter that which, if expressed in the poet's fitting words, would satisfy an intelligent reader. Among its means

It

are

images and symbols, its essence is vivid personification. It addresses itself, therefore, to the imaginative as well as the reflective faculties. But, at its best, all it asks is an intelligent consideration · an audience such as would enjoy and sympathize with the poet in his higher moods.

If, however, this higher form of art is again to lay hold of the common mind, to be a thing really felt and enjoyed as well as understood, it must not only abandon all the effeminate Della Cruscan use of wornout names and attributes, but must present itself in an intelligent and comprehensible as well as poetic guise. It must neither be supersubtle, nor vaguely recondite, but clear to those who will take the trouble to understand it: though even on the walls of a railway station an allegory need not be like a Notice to Passengers, so expressed that he who runs may read.

Herr Echter has, in the pictures before us, fairly grappled with the requirements of a modern allegory, if he has not wholly mastered them. In the Railway' and the Electric Telegraph' he has essayed to deal with the Present without resorting for assistance to the Past. His personages are the beings of To-Day, as mirrored in his Imagination. He has not sought to exhaust his conception, but leaves something to the imagination of the spectator. has given not the whole thought, but the suggestion of the thought so that, as is ever the case in true poetry, he will there find most who brings most.

He

deceased), along with Von Schwind, Hiltensperger, Piloty, and Foltz, to paint a series of large pictures from the leading events in the lives of the Bavarian princes, and his share of the undertaking is considered to be certainly not the least successful. The present is, however, his most ambitious effort.

The picture of the 'Electric Telegraph' is, in many respects, very different in feeling from that of the 'Railway.' It is wider in scope, more universal in its appeal. The other was local, or, at most, national, in its range of vision. The overturned bureaucrat is essentially German. The scattered gate-tickets, wanderbuchs, passports, are all German, but the Bavarian are the most marked. On the other hand, the 'Electric Telegraph' is written in a language common to all. And as it is higher in aim, so is it more purely poetic in expression, lovelier and more graceful in imagery.

The Electric Force, personified as a female of powerful frame, and capable of swift energetic action, occupies the centre of the composition. She is an earth Power, strong, sinewy, muscular, as having much work to do and the capacity to do it. Though sufficiently freed from her native earth to accomplish readily the work that lies before her, she is yet not wholly freed, still drawing from it life and vigour. Her mighty arms, stretched apart to their utmost extent, indicate the opposite electric poles. They are upheld by peasant hands, the hands of the stalwart, heavy-browed miners, to whose industry she owes her free external existence, and on whose aid she still depends. Upwards streams from her the marvellous fluid that accomplishes daily and hourly for us wonders greater than ever entered into the heart of man to conceive. It flows forth on all sides, from body arms and hands-even her wild hair streaming out like tongues of fire charged with messages of weal or woe. But while it streams forth thus madly, it is gathered up by one hand and transmitted in a freely flowing yet regular current, traceable behind the buoyant children, to the opposite hand, whence it is carried

down, and the mystic circle is completed.

On either side, sitting with an open scroll on her knees and pen in hand, is a nymph-typifying, as suggested by the slight indications of vegetation at their feet, one luxuriant, the other scant and small, the opposite ends of the earth. The nymph on the left is whispering a message into the ear of her attendant messenger-a winged child, unconscious as the actual telegraph's material wires, of the meaning of what it conveys. By him the message is transmitted to the second of the chain of genii, with whom he is in connection (hand linked in hand), and thus it is carried on to the last, who repeats the message he has so mysteriously received to the righthand nymph, and she in her turn swiftly writes it down.

Such, as it appears to us, is, broadly, the purpose of the allegory. Every German holds himself free to interpret an allegory after his own fashion, and some famous allegories have, consequently, almost as many interpretations as interpreters. Very likely, therefore, this of Echter's may be found differently rendered by German critics: but our version will, we believe, be found tolerably faithful to the author's meaning. Be it understood, however, that we only profess to have sketched the broad outline. The reader must fill in the details for himself. And he will find, as he does so, not only that the analogy will come out much more fully, but that many a delicate and subtle trait will reveal itself. We have, for example, indicated the connection and affinities of the female personifying the Electric Force, with earth, the metals, &c.; but dwell a while patiently on the group of which she is the centre, and see how many

other, and finer, are the scientific and poetic relations which the painter has at least desired to suggest : how many are the turns of thought for which these serve as galvanic conductors. So, again, notice the manner in which the message is conveyed, how carefully the idea of the secrecy, as well as the rapidity of the transmission of intelligence is rendered. The nymph who forwards the message places her hand against her face, that not the feeblest echo of the words she whispers may reach any other ear than that of her tiny child-messenger, who, on his part, curves his hand around his ear with like design. So the child who imparts the message moulds both his hands, trumpet-like, as he hovers above the nymph who receives it. She, again, sets close her hand before her ear that no syllable may be lost, or murmur onwards, to be caught up by vagrant listeners.

These are but crude hints: the reader will easily improve on them. If they set him in the right track, it is all that is needed. Of the beauty of the composition as a work of art; the power of drawing; the skilful arrangement, regard being had to the place the picture occupies, and the distance from which it has to be seen; the grandeur of form, and majesty of expression in the female representing the Electric Force; the loveliness of feature in the listening nymph, and the grace of both, with the fine contrast between them and the central figure; the beauty of the buoyant children-and in drawing children Echter almost rivals his master Kaulbach, happiest by far, in this matter, of all the Munich painters of these and other technical merits, and shortcomings, this is not the place to speak, and the reader will be best pleased to find them out for himself.