remains
of the heroic explorer, who had been found only to be lost again,
were brought home to be laid among the mighty dead of England. The
fervent Christian philanthropy of Livingstone endeared him yet more
to the national heart; and we may here note that very often, as in
his case, the missionary has served not only Christianity, as was his
first and last aim, but also geographical and ethnological science
and colonial and commercial development. We have briefly referred
already to some of the struggles, the sufferings, and the triumphs of
missionary enterprise in our day: to chronicle all its effort and
achievement would be difficult, for these have been world-wide, and
often wonderfully successful. Nor has much less success crowned other
agencies for meeting the ever-increasing need for religious
knowledge, which multiply and grow in number and in power. Witness,
among many that might be named, the continuous development of the
Sunday School system and the immensely extended operations of the
unsectarian Bible Society.

[Illustration: John Ruskin. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_.]

Great advances have been made during this reign in English art and
art-criticism, and more particularly in the extension of real
artistic education to classes of the community who could hardly
attain it before, though it was perhaps more essential to them than
to the wealthy and leisurely who had previously monopolised it. The
multiplication of Schools of Design over the country, intended to
promote the tasteful efficiency of those engaged in textile
manufactures and in our decorative and constructive art generally, is
one remarkable feature of the time, and the sedulous cultivation of
music by members of all classes of society is another, hardly less
hopeful. In all these efforts for the benefit and elevation of the
community the Prince Consort took deep and active interest, and the
royal family themselves, from Her Majesty downwards, highly cultured
and accomplished, have not failed to act in the same spirit. But the
history of English nineteenth-century art would be incomplete indeed
without reference to two powerful influences--the rise and progress
of the new art of photography, which has singularly affected other
branches of graphic work; and the career, hitherto unexampled in our
land, of the greatest art-critic of this, perhaps of any, age--John
Ruskin, the most eminent also of the many writers and thinkers who
have been