upon the Wellington Monument and the Dorchester House chimney-piece a finer knowledge of line in Stevens’s work.  Michael Angelo’s Medici figures, and indeed, his other famous works, are not so unequivocably good; the effigies superimposing the sarcophagi are, for brief instance, “pillowy,” though they may be more anatomic.  The suavity of nature’s hypo-refined grace is not traceable in their easy posture.  The fact is, that they pose for something; generally their own animal idiosyncrasy, if not respectable vanity.  Stevens’s figures, on the contrary, always for their own decency, which throws into the core, the heart of the monument such an expression of beauty, giving rise to the word innate, quenching the sense of frivolity, which unrestrained, disordered state of things oozes out somewhere, or is at any rate felt “in the air” in Michael Angelo’s works.  Stevens’s head was wonderfully poised on his own “torso” to know and feel this with such thrilling, vital, consistent certainty.  You catch awhile his lovely idea in the strong fragrant symmetry permeating his work.  The iron soul of the man implants his lines of strength far inside the actual bounds of the visible crust, and the mind of the idea, naturally expanding is caught at the salient “processes” in curves and features, betokening nothing—­that touches—­but grace.  I should mention that there is one fact which describes minutely my veneration for Stevens’s work at its best, perhaps the fullest; whereby I mean that inspection of his intellectual labour has always restored to me the time so wisely occupied in regarding it, proving that there is goodness, virtue, essence in it, past all fellowship with ephemeral things.  There is a true, not a laconic, logical, and prophetic inference in it that is apropriately styled, “time”; the finest embodiment of musical equipoise; felt to a “tick”; no faltering, barbaric, or false quantities, but a sustained and equable, uniform tone of chromatic measure, meted out as by a mind imbued by but sacrificing the scale of colour to its own actual, achieved end.  One misses the heated passion of Watts’s best pictures, which flow through the ordered channel of recognisable expression and make one adore them as poetry.  But there, of a truth, invidious comparison ends, and reticence shall ever guard the space that intervenes betwixt the grounds sacred to the exposition of the embodiment of these master lights.

MUSIC.

From the BATH CHRONICLE, January 30th, 1902.

MEDITATION ON BERTHOLD TOURS’ EVENING SERVICE IN “D.”

To the Editor of the Bath Chronicle.