form, at the same time, the "Last Judgment" on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the glorious dome of St. Peter's, and the group of "Notre Dame de Pitié," which now adorns the chapel of the Crucifix, under the roof of that august edifice. The "Holy Family" in the Palazzo Pitti at Florence, and the "Three Fates" in the same collection, give an idea of his powers in oil painting; thus he carried to the highest perfection, at the same time, the rival arts of architecture, sculpture, fresco, and oil painting. may truly be called the founder of Italian painting, as Homer was of the ancient epic, and Dante of the great style in modern poetry. None but a colossal mind could have done such things. Raphael took lessons from him in painting, and professed through life the most unbounded respect for his great preceptor. None have attempted to approach him in architecture; the cupola of St. Peter's stands alone in the world.

But notwithstanding all this, Michael Angelo had some defects. He created the great style in painting, a style which has made modern Italy as immortal as the arms of the legions did the ancient. But the very grandeur of his conceptions, the vigor of his drawing, his incomparable command of bone and muscle, his lofty expression and impassioned mind, made him neglect, and perhaps despise, the lesser details of his art. Ardent in the pursuit of expression, he often overlooked execution. When he painted the "Last Judgment" or the "Fall of the Titans" in fresco, on the ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel, he was incomparable; but that gigantic style was unsuitable for lesser pictures or rooms of ordinary proportions. By the study of his masterpieces, subsequent painters have often been led astray; they have aimed at force of expression to the neglect of delicacy in execution. This defect is, in an especial manner, conspicuous in Sir Joshua Reynolds, who worshiped Michael Angelo with the most devoted fervor; and through him it has descended to Lawrence, and nearly the whole modern school of England. When we see Sir Joshua's noble glass window in Magdalen College, Oxford, we behold the work of a worthy pupil of Michael Angelo; we see the great style of painting in its proper place, and applied to its appropriate object: but when we compare his portraits, or imaginary pieces, in oil, with those of Titian, Velasquez, or Vandyke, the inferiority is manifest. It is not in the design, but the finishing; not in the conception, but the execution. The colors are frequently raw and harsh; the details or distant parts of the piece

ill-finished or neglected. The bold neglect of Michael Angelo is very apparent. Raphael, with less original genius than his immortal master, had more taste and much greater delicacy of pencil; his conceptions, less extensive and varied, are more perfect; his finishing is always exquisite. Unity of emotion was his great object in design; equal delicacy of finishing in execution. Thence he has attained by universal consent the highest place in painting.

"Nothing," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is denied to welldirected labor; nothing is to be attained without it." "Excellence in any department," says Johnson, "can now be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." These words should ever be present to the minds of all who aspire to rival the great of former days; who feel in their bosoms a spark of the spirit which led Homer, Dante, and Michael Angelo to immortality. In a luxurious age, comfort or station is deemed the chief good of life; in a commercial community, money becomes the universal object of ambition. Thence our acknowledged deficiency in the fine arts; thence our growing weakness in the higher branches of literature Talent looks for its reward too soon. Genius seeks an immediate recompense; long protracted exertions are never attempted; great things are not done because great efforts are not made.

None will work now without the prospect of an immediate return. Very possibly it is so; but then let us not hope or wish for immortality. « Present time and future," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "are rivals; he who solicits the one must expect to be discountenanced by the other." It is not that we want genius; what we want is the great and heroic spirit which will devote itself, by strenuous efforts, to great things, without seeking any reward but their accomplishment.

Nor let it be said that great subjects for the painter's pencil, the poet's muse, are not to be found-that they are exhausted by former efforts, and nothing remains to us but imitation. Nature is inexhaustible; the events of men are unceasing, their variety is endless. Philosophers were mourning the monotony of time, historians were deploring the sameness of events, in the years preceding the French Revolution -on the eve of the Reign of Terror, the flames of Moscow, the retreat from Russia. What was the strife around Troy to the battle of Leipsic ? The contests of Florence and Pisa to the Revolutionary War? What ancient naval victory to that of Trafalgar? Rely upon it,

subjects for genius are not wanting; genius itself, steadily and perseveringly directed, is the thing required. But genius and energy alone are not sufficient; courage and disinterestedness are needed more than all. Courage to withstand the assaults of envy, to despise the ridicule of mediocrity-disinterestedness to trample under foot the seductions of ease, and disregard the attractions of opulence. A heroic mind is more wanted in the library or the studio than in the field. It is wealth and cowardice that extinguish the light of genius, and dig the grave of literature as of nations.

From an essay in Blackwood's for January, 1845.

GRANT ALLEN

(1848-1899)

RANT ALLEN, one of the most popular scientific essayists of his day, was born at Kingston, Canada, February 24th, 1848. His sponsors christened him "Charles Grant Blairfindie » Allen, but, as a result of his well-deserved international celebrity, this has been shortened to "Grant." As "Cecil Powers" and "J. Arbuthnot Wilson" he has done no inconsiderable work as a novelist and miscellaneous writer, but it is on his scientific essays, published in English periodicals, that his enduring reputation will rest. Except in the late Prof. R. A. Proctor, he has had no rival in popularizing science, and in the lightness of his touch he surpasses Proctor. His sense of humor is delicate, and, while it appears in such works as his essay on the "Scientific Aspects of Falling in Love," he does not allow it to discredit him or to lower him in the eyes of the reader from the plane of the scientist to that of the humorist. His uncollected essays published during the last twenty years are numbered by the score. The article on Apparitions" in the current edition of the British Encyclopædia is from his pen. He died in London, October 25th, 1899.

SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF FALLING IN LOVE

N ANCIENT and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir George Campbell has set his face against the time-honored practice of Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the institution itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator, however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern He would always like to regulate human life generally as a department of the India Office; and so Sir George Campbell would fain have husbands and wives selected for one another (perhaps on Doctor Johnson's principle, by the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future.

development of the race, in the process which he not very felicitously or elegantly describes as "man-breeding." "Probably," he says, as reported in Nature, "we have enough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in the pairing of individuals of the same or allied races, if we could only apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, instead of giving way to foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whom we can hardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in a graver matter in which they are most likely to be influenced by frivolous prejudices." He wants us, in other words, to discard the deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and to substitute for them some calm and dispassionate but artificial selection of a fitting partner as the father or mother of future generations.

Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treated seriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir George Campbell's conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion now being forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far from considering love as a "foolish idea," opposed to the best interests of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists, especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct, developed and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell thinks he could himself effect by a conscious and deliberate process of selection. More than that, I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure most evolutionists would cordially agree with me), that this beneficent inherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it has in view far more admirably, subtly, and satisfactorily, on the average of instances, than any clumsy human selective substitute could possibly effect it.

In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and confiding belief that marriages are made in heaven, with the further corollary that heaven manages them, one time with another, a great deal better than Sir George Campbell.

Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the standard of human efficiency and then let us consider what would be the probable result of any definite conscious attempt to substitute for it some more deliberate external agency.