admitted freely on the afternoons of Sunday, and it is not improbable that, eventually, daily service will be performed here, which, of course, would be also open to them.

Reverting to the topic of our introductory remarks--progress, and the probable effect of the present restoration-whither may we hope its influence will guide us? The state of our cathedrals will at once occur to every one: what a world of whitewash is there not to be removed, what exquisite chapels and chapter houses to be restored, even in a mere architectural sense-witness the disgraceful state of the chapter-house of Westminster Abbey, for instance; what piles of monuments to be carried up into the Triforiums, before even the peculiar features of the Temple restoration-the decorative-are begun. But, supposing all this accomplished, are we to rest there? Let us answer the question by imagining, for a moment, what might be done within some given period, under favourable circumstances. To begin with the Temple. Whilst we may be certain that we have by no means reached the pinnacle of mere decorative splendour allowed by the severest taste, we have yet to call to our aid in such structures the highest artists-more particularly the sacred painter, with his solemn frescoes from Holy Writ, to which all other decorations should be but the mere adjuncts. The stranger wandering from such a building as this will find it stands not alone; that Art has asserted and established its universality. If he walks into the hall of the neighbouring University (we beg the reader still to accompany us in imagination), he finds a series of grand designs illustrative of the objects of the institution; he sees Theology, Jurisprudence, and Philosophy, each surrounded by her disciples-the messengers unto the world of all that the world has most reason to cherish. From the University to the Gallery of Art; with its long external range of statues of the great masters whose works are within, with its exquisite pediment, showing all the processes of sculpture, from the modelling of the clay and the hewing of the marble, up to the last touching of the finished production. Within he finds the accumulated stores, arranged with the most consummate skill, every work carefully placed, so as to be well lighted, and beautifully relieved against the back or surrounding walls-he finds the whole informned by one harmonious spirit-above all, he finds that each department reveals its own artistical history, from the earliest to the present time, by the quality and sequence of the works. Looking still farther, he perceives that, from the prince to the peasant, there is a comparatively universal sense of enjoyment in and appreciation of these things. Whilst the King, if he has a palace to build, says to the architect, "Build me a palace, in which nothing within or without shall be of transient fashion or interest; a palace for my posterity, and my people, as well as my self," and obtains accordingly such a work as has seldom or never before been seen, the people on their parts are stopping here in crowds, parents with their children, soldiers, mechanics, young and old, to examine the paintings of the public arcade, as they pass through it on their ordinary business; works by the rising painters of the day, the men of young but acknowledged genius, who are preparing themselves for the highest demands that can be made upon them, in this series, illustrating all the great events of the national history. Again- --"But," interrupts a reader," you do not mean seriously to intimate

that all this is practicable, or at least within the next half-dozen centuries?— It is a mere dream." Very possibly. The ideas, so hastily suggested here, may be too gigantic for accomplishment in the great capital of the great British Empire; not the less, however, has all that we have described, and a thousand times more than could be gathered from our remarks, been done in the capital of the little kingdom of Bavaria, and in twenty years! All honour to the poetking, Ludwig the First, and to the artists with whom he feels honoured in connecting his name.

AMONG what may be called the open-air Exhibitions of London-the collections of works of art gratuitously exposed to public view-there are none more interesting than the "External Paper-hangers' Stations." The windows of the printshops-especially of those in which caricatures are exhibited-have great attractions, doubtless: but there is a grandeur and boldness in the chefs-d'œuvre of the stations, which completely eclipses them. The engravings in the printshop windows have contracted a good deal of that mincing elaborateness of finish which characterizes what may be called the Annuals' School of Art; those which we see at the stations, on the contrary, have all the boldness, if not much of the imagination and artistical skill of Salvator Rosa, and may compete the palm in roughness, at least, with the Elgin Marbles in their present weather-worn condition.

The stations of the External Paper-hangers are numerous, but rather ephcmeral in their existence, and migratory in their propensities. It requires no great previous preparation, or expenditure of capital to establish one. Any dead wall, or any casing of boards around a public monument or public dwelling in the process of erection, on which the cabalistic words "Bill-Stickers, beware!" or "Stick no Bills!" have not been traced, may be, without more ado converted into a place of exhibition. And the assiduity with which the "Hanging Committee" of the great metropolis adorn the brick or wooden structure with a fresh supply of artistical gems every morning is amazing.

The boarded fence at the top of the stairs leading down to the steam-boat station at the north-end of Waterloo Bridge, the dead wall beside the English Opera House in North Wellington Street, the houses condemned to have the "improvements" driven through where Newport Street abuts upon St. Martin's Lane,

VOL. V.

D

the enclosure round the Nelson's Monument in Trafalgar Square, the enclosure of the space on the west side of St. James's Street, where the Junior United Service Club House is about to be erected, are at present the most fashionable and conspicuous of these exhibitions at the "West End." The purlieus of the new Royal Exchange are most in vogue in the City, but the rapid progress of the buildings threatens ere long to force the exhibiters to seek a new locality.

The attractive character of the objects exhibited at these places sufficiently accounts for the crowds of lounging amateurs which may at almost every hour of the day be found congregated around them. There are colossal specimens of typography, in juxtaposition with which the puny letters of our pages would look like a snug citizen's box placed beside the pyramids of Egypt. There are rainbowhued placards, vying in gorgeous extravagance of colour with Turner's last new picture. There are tables of contents of all the weekly newspapers, often more piquant and alluring than the actual newspapers themselves, these annunciatory placards not unfrequently bearing the same relation to the journals that the tempting skins of Dead-Sea fruits have been said to bear to their dry, choking substance: or, to adopt a more domestic simile, that the portraits outside of wild-beast caravans do to the beasts within. Then there are pictures of

pens, gigantic as the plumes in the casque of the Castle of Otranto, held in hands as huge as that which was seen on the banisters of the said castle; spectacles of enormous size, fit to grace the eyes of an ogre; Irishmen dancing under the influence of Guinness's Dublin Stout or Beamish's Cork Particular; ladies in riding habits and gentlemen in walking dresses of incredible cheapness; prize oxen, whose very appearance is enough to satiate the appetite for ever. Lastly, there are "Bills o' the Play," lettered and hieroglyphical, and it is hard to say which is the most enticing. One of the former tells us that "Love" has just returned from America, and will "perform" alternately at the Strand Theatre and Crosby Hall during the whole of Lent." This announcement, by the association of ideas, reminds one that St. Valentine's is just past, and Byron's 'Beppo' is still in existence. But the Pictorial Bills o' the Play bring before our startled eyes a “Domestic Tale," in the shape of one man shooting another on the quarter-deck of a vessel in flames, off the coast of Van Diemen's Land, with emigrants and convicts of all shapes and sizes crowded on the shore; or the grand fight between grenadiers and Jacobite conspirators, in the "Miser's Daughter;" or "Jack Ketch," caught on his own scaffold; or a view of the "tremendous Khyber Pass," as it may be seen nightly at the Queen's Theatre, with Lady Sale at the top of it brandishing a pistol in either hand, beneath the cocked and levelled terrors of which a row of turbaned Orientals kneel on either side of the heroine. And here we may pause to remark, how hopeful must be the attempt to extract the true history of ancient Greece out of its epic poets and dramatists, when modern playwrights are seen to take such liberties with the veracious chronicles of contemporary newspapers.

It becomes philosophical historians to penetrate beneath the mere shows and external surfaces of things. The works of Phidias and Michael Angelo were not simply meant to be pleasing to look upon-they were intended to be agents in exciting and keeping up devotional feelings. And in like manner the gaudy ornaments with which our External Paper-hangers adorn their stations have a

utility of their own, and are meant (this is noted for the information of posterity, for the living generation know it well enough) to serve the purposes of advertising for the interests of individuals, as well as of amusing the public at large.

A strange chapter in the history of man might be written on the subject of Advertisements. They became necessary as soon as any tribe became numerous enough for any one member of it to be hid in a crowd. The heralds of whom we read in Homer were the first "advertising mediums," and in remote country towns the class still exists in the shape of town drummers and town bellmen, employed to proclaim orally to the citizens all impending auctions, and many perpetrated larcenies, with losings and findings of every possible category. Manuscript placards seem to have been next in order: some fossilized specimens of them have been preserved on the walls of Pompeii, under the showers of moistened ashes with which that town was potted for the inspection of posterity. Of this system of advertising existing samples may occasionally be seen in rural districts, where manuscript announcements of hay crops for sale and farms to let are from time to time stuck up on the gates of the churchyard; or even in the suburbs of the metropolis, in the guise of exhortations to purchase "Warren's Blacking," or try somebody's "Gout and Rheumatic Oil." The invention of printing naturally caused printed placards and posting bills in a great measure to supersede the written ones; with the increased circulation of newspapers the practice gained ground of making them the vehicle of advertisements; and finally all sorts of periodicals, and even books published once for all, have been made to carry along with them a prefix or an appendix of these useful announce

ments.

With every increase in the multiplicity of industrial avocations, and in the density of population, increases the necessity of devising new vehicles of advertisements, and alluring forms for them. In order to live, a man must get employment; in order to get employment, his existence and his talents must be known; and, in proportion to the numbers by whom he is surrounded must be his efforts to distinguish himself among the crowd. In a company of half-a-dozen, the man who is an inch taller than his fellows is distinguished by this slight difference; but, in a congregation of ten thousand, it requires the stature of the Irish giant to make a man conspicuous. It might easily be imagined, therefore, even though the proofs were not before our eyes, to what a degree of refined perfection the art of advertising has been carried in our crammed and busy London. There are advertisements direct and indirect, explicit and by innuendo; there is the newspaper advertisement, the placard, and the hand-bill; there is the advertisement literary and the advertisement pictorial; there is the advertisement in the form of a review or of a newspaper paragraph; there is the advertisement (most frequently of some milliner, or tailor, or jeweller, or confectioner) lurking in the pages of a fashionable novel. Some people write books merely to let the world in general, or at least those who have official appointments to bestow, know that they are there, and, in trading phrase," open to an engagement." Nay, some there are who, by constantly forcing their personal presence on public notice, convert themselves into ambulatory placards, making their lives, not what the sentimentalist calls "one long-drawn sigh," but one incessantly repeated and wearisome advertisement.