receiving a degree ’that shall acknowledge her to be as wise as Merlin himself and leave her still as beautiful as Vivien.’  This proposal is, of course, very well meant, but, to say nothing of the danger of leaving historic art at the mercy of a majority in the House of Commons, who would naturally vote for its own view of things, Mr. Bayliss does not seem to realise that a great event is not necessarily a pictorial event.  ‘The decisive events of the world,’ as has been well said, ‘take place in the intellect,’ and as for Board-schools, academic ceremonies, hospital wards and the like, they may well be left to the artists of the illustrated papers, who do them admirably and quite as well as they need be done.  Indeed, the pictures of contemporary events, Royal marriages, naval reviews and things of this kind that appear in the Academy every year, are always extremely bad; while the very same subjects treated in black and white in the Graphic or the London News are excellent.  Besides, if we want to understand the history of a nation through the medium of art, it is to the imaginative and ideal arts that we have to go and not to the arts that are definitely imitative.  The visible aspect of life no longer contains for us the secret of life’s spirit.  Probably it never did contain it.  And, if Mr. Barker’s Waterloo Banquet and Mr. Frith’s Marriage of the Prince of Wales are examples of healthy historic art, the less we have of such art the better.  However, Mr. Bayliss is full of the most ardent faith and speaks quite gravely of genuine portraits of St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul dating from the first century, and of the establishment by the Israelites of a school of art in the wilderness under the now little appreciated Bezaleel.  He is a pleasant, picturesque writer, but he should not speak about art.  Art is a sealed book to him.

The Enchanted Island.  By Wyke Bayliss, F.S.A., President of the Royal Society of British Artists. (Allen and Co.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES—­II

(Woman’s World, February 1889.)

‘The various collectors of Irish folk-lore,’ says Mr. W. B. Yeats in his charming little book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, ’have, from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of others, one great fault.’

They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after.  To be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales in forms like grocers’ bills—­item the fairy king, item the queen.  Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.  Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility, saw everything humorised.  The impulse of the Irish