ts of life, high-bred, learned, and discreet."

Taken as a whole, Mr. Hamerton's two volumes have very much the
character of an autobiography, which explains at once the striking
merits and faults of the writings considered as contributions to the
literature of Art. The plan of his work is well understood. The first
volume very truly represents Practice, and the second represents
Reflection. The first concerns "the active life of a landscape-painter";
the second contains reflections that naturally occurred to that painter,
or were suggested by his work. The first chapter of the second volume of
his essays is a conclusive statement of the necessity "that certain
artists should write about Art."

We hope our introduction of Mr. Hamerton will increase the number of
serious and patient readers, and that the American Art public will make
haste to profit by his thoughts. He is a landscape-painter, and one of
the ablest contributors to the "London Fine Arts Quarterly Review." W.
M. Rossetti has paid a tribute to his worth as a painter and critic, and
even the "Saturday Review" greeted him as a writer of ability. Certainly
we take his book to be the latest and best contribution to the
literature of Art published since Ruskin's "Modern Painters." Mr.
Hamerton's writings are the work of a man who does not decline the free
expression of his opinions before accredited masters in Art or
Literature. He relies upon himself, when those masters contradict the
teachings of his own experience. In this we have the proof of mental
manhood, which, among writers, is sufficiently rare, unknown even, to be
remarked, and at all times welcomed.

FOOTNOTES:

[F] _A Painter's Camp in the Highlands_, and _Thoughts about Art_. By
Philip Gilbert Hamerton. London: Macmillan & Co.

THE LUCK OF ABEL STEADMAN.

A few months ago I made a collecting tour for Wirt and Company through
that stretch of country watered by the Ohio. Thirty years ago I had
spent a summer there, and the change bewildered me: not that the rough
buckeye and hemlock woods and mountain creeks had been railwayed,
canalled, bored for coal, and derricked for oil; I looked for that; but
the people had cropped out into a new phase of life.

They were lazy, smoky old towns,--those upper Virginia and Kentucky
villages,--when I was a young man; something of the solitude of "the
dark and bloody hunting-grounds" hanging about them yet; the old forts
still standing which had been