sure to
interest them with his chapter on "Word-Painting and Color-Painting,"
and that on "The Painter in his Relation to Society." Mr. Hamerton shows
himself to be an acute and manly essayist in the treatment of these
subjects. His chapter on "Word-Painting and Color-Painting" is fresh and
direct in treatment, and therein he breaks new ground. He presents the
truths of his subject so felicitously, that, as in reading Emerson's
essays, we are surprised it has not occurred to another to say the same
things equally well.

But even here we are disposed to find fault with Mr. Hamerton. In
mentioning the masters of the much-abused art, the much-discredited art
of word-painting, he forgets Robert Browning! Can Mr. Hamerton find any
poet more decisive, more exact, more rapid and effective in suggestion
of Nature than Browning? In the development of this very happy essay, we
have examples or characterizations of the peculiar talent of Scott, of
Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Keats, of Byron, of Shelley, and of
Tennyson, among poets,--of George Sand, of Lamartine, of Charlotte
Bronte, of Marian Evans, and of John Ruskin, among prose-writers. In
this essay, while awarding to Tennyson among poets, and to Ruskin among
prose-writers, the honor of good preeminence in the art of
word-painting, he at the same time subjects the latter to a criticism
perhaps unexpected, certainly effective. Mr. Hamerton points out Mr.
Ruskin's poetic fallacies, and forcibly demonstrates the crushing power
of common-sense,--that is to say, unimpassioned sense,--when acting upon
whatever has grown out of an emotion. It is somewhat cruel, if not
brutal, to cry havoc over Mr. Ruskin's tender "lichens that lay quiet
finger on the trembling stones, to _teach them rest_."

Mr. Hamerton's essay is not artistic or symmetrical, but it is the
direct expression of much thought. Yet it certainly lets him escape
being classed among masters of style. He tells us that Ruskin was
annoyed because people paid no attention to his arguments, but were
always admiring his language. Has Mr. Hamerton avoided the affluent and
felicitous of written words, has he disowned arrangement and proportion,
that he might secure a public to regard his thought as more than its
medium of communication? Very well; we discover that he is never
obscure, that he is no word-monger, that he is seldom seduced by the
example of writers whose literary talent overrides their honesty. Among
Art writers,