and middle classes go on insuring in life offices, and investing their money in banks and bonds, which are notoriously rotten, unprotected working men will in the future, as they have in the past, continue to pin their faith to societies of which the statistics, if they could understand them, would prove their utter want of stability. However sad may be the result of the annual audit or quinquennial valuation, the Government certificate of registration will remain, duly framed, suspended on the walls of the clubroom. A very little skill on the part of sanguine and specious officials will suffice to explain away the temporary bad effect of an unfavourable report. And so the old story of misplaced confidence and certain ruin will be told again and again. There do not appear to be sufficient grounds for assuming that publicity will suffice to meet existing abuses.

There are no means of obtaining accurate statistics as to the number of unregistered Friendly Societies now in existence; but it is known that they are very numerous. It may not unreasonably be anticipated that the increased stringency of the Act now in force will have the effect of largely increasing the numbers of this class of society. It is hoped that the five years from January 1876, which will elapse before the first quinquennial valuation must be made, will give the more substantial clubs time to set their house in order, and prepare to meet their clients with a fair balance-sheet. This may occur; but it is equally probable that a large number of weak societies will cut the Gordian knot of their difficulties by severing their connection with the Government. Many unregistered benefit clubs have existed and even prospered for years. The advantages to be gained by registration are neither very great nor very obvious. Still it would be a great calamity if the numbers of unregistered societies were to increase. The greatest evils of the present system are undoubtedly to be found among them.

The prospects, then, of the movement do not seem very brilliant under the existing law. The only remedy which suggests itself is a much closer supervision, accompanied with far greater powers of compulsion and prohibition, on the part of the State. But for some time past there has been a growing tendency to avoid direct legislation. Nor is this tendency confined to the subject before us, or to England alone. Mr. Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, referring to an Act of the permissive kind, which passed the Legislature of New York in 1874, but which has since remained a dead letter, remarks that "this kind of legislation, the passing of laws which are intended to be shams, is highly characteristic, and enables the State which adopts it to combine the credit of advanced civilization with the realities of barbarism." No one would accuse so earnest a politician as Sir Stafford Northcote of intentionally fostering a sham; but what Mr. Pattison has

said of compulsory education is certainly true in the case of Friendly Society legislation. A merely permissive law will have far less effect than is needed to put this great movement into a healthy condition. Nor is there any real interference with the liberty of the subject, or any unduly paternal supervision of the efforts of private individuals, in the proposal to legislate firmly and vigorously on Friendly Societies. Such interference and paternal supervision would really be found in a very different direction. The law which is desired would be no attempt at domination by one. class over another; it would be, on the contrary, a rational act of legislation passed by a Parliament elected by a large number of the very persons who would be most interested in its effects.

Apart from the sentimental objection on the part of successive Governments to interfere with the efforts of a large class of private individuals, there is a difficulty which is undoubtedly of a formidable kind. After collecting information and obtaining statistics, both of which are available after an experience of eighty years, the Government might proceed to enforce the adoption of certain scales of payments and benefits. These might work fairly well in ordinary times, but exceptional seasons or circumstances might arise in which the system might break down to the obvious discredit of the Government. As, however, this is the only real difficulty in the way, it is hard to believe that a scheme could not be devised by which exceptional fluctuations might be met. At any rate the Legislature might insist upon a maximum and a minimum of payments and benefits respectively. This would do away with a vast amount of the misery which springs up in the absence of any such regulation.

It is neither suggested that the State should undertake the business of conducting Friendly Societies, nor that it should incur the responsibility of guaranteeing any scales. To do either of these things would be really to interfere with the voluntary action of working men. Only one thing would be a still stronger and less unwarrantable act of interference-to compel every working man to join a benefit club.

The ground is now clear to suggest that what would probably set the Friendly Society movement in a healthy position would be:

:

1. Compulsory registration of every benefit society.

2. The compulsory adoption of a limit in scales of payments

and benefits.

3. Audit and valuation by a Government official.

4. The winding-up of every society proved to be in a hopelessly insolvent condition.*

In the State of New York every insurance office is under strict Government supervision, and is subject to this rule.

If the views now put forward are correct, the future of Friendly Societies would be very different under these rules from what it may be expected to be without further legislation. One incidental result of the adoption of such regulations would certainly be that the small societies would be absorbed into the great ones. Nor would this be an evil. It would certainly be advantageous that every member of a Friendly Society should be an Odd Fellow or a Forester. And as these societies are already, in a sense, above the law as proposed to be modified, it would appear that the coercive legislation suggested would hardly be felt after a few years. And with the small societies the abuses of the present system, such as the squandering of club funds on dinners or their employment for Trades Union purposes-that is, on political rather than social objects-would also disappear. The question must not be allowed to sleep. As the pernicious action of the Poor-law, which suggests carelessness, becomes better understood, and is, therefore, gradually modified-a process which is already going on in the diminution of out-door relief-it is important that the only true substitute for it, the Friendly Society, which suggests self-reliance, should be strengthened and encouraged.

W. WALTER EDWARDS.

IMPERFECT GENIUS: WILLIAM BLAKE.

PART II.

UR examination of Blake's claims to the higher qualities of genius as a designer and painter must be limited to the notice of such salient features of his art as are apparent to an ordinarily educated observer, without pretensions to an expert's skill. We may first review the impressions derived from a series of visits to the recent exhibition of his unpublished works at the Burlington Club, which, from its comprehensiveness as a collection, afforded to those who knew him imperfectly by his published works an opportunity of estimating his power at successive periods, and introduced him to many who were only acquainted with him by report. We venture to think that it must have dispelled not a little illusion concerning the sources and the range of his ideas. To any one moderately familiar with the works of the great artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and some of Blake's own contemporaries, a single visit brought repeated suggestions of reminiscence. A little observation disclosed an amount of selfrepetition and mannerism strangely at variance with his reputation for fertility. Out of three or four hundred designs, we doubt if the number of original conceptions exceeded twenty, and of these, several were rather entitled to be so called on account of their wildness or mysteriousness than of their beauty or force. Such designs as "The Nativity" (No. 89), "Jephthah's Sacrifice" (No. 168), and "Famine" (No. 140), stand out almost apart in our remembrance, as examples of underived idea and unexaggerated

realization. Commencing with his early works, such as "Joseph ordering Simeon to be bound," and "Joseph making himself known to his Brethren," one recognized the weak manner of West and Hamilton. A somewhat later series of designs from "Comus" and others bore a marked resemblance to the style of Stothard. The characteristic mannerisms of Fuseli, theatrical posing and violent exaggeration of muscular action, were discernible in such works as "Samson breaking his Bonds," and "The Blasphemer Stoned," among others; but whether the influence of their common master, Michel Angelo, reached Blake after being filtered through his associate's mind, or through a different channel, might be open to question. Any one acquainted with the fact that he had devoted himself in youth to copying the works of the great Italian and German masters from engravings purchased at art-sales or procured for study at the Royal Academy library," would find confirmation of it in the frequent stiffness, timidity, and tameness of his drawing, and in observing that he comparatively seldom imitated directly from a single master, but compounded reminiscences of more than one. Some instances, however, of direct imitation or reminiscence were obvious enough. The conception of Jehovah, in the design for the creation of Eve (Nos. 214, &c.), reproduced the type and attitude of Raffaelle's, in one of the Loggie frescoes; the attitude of Newton measuring the earth with a compass (No. 172), that of Archimedes, in "The School of Athens;" the action of Moloch (in one of the Miltonic series) holding up a child by its foot, that of the executioner in "The Judgment of Solomon." Michel Angelo's Moses reappeared more than once, as in "The Burning Bush," and "The Transfiguration" (Nos. 78 and 79). The representation of the serpent tempting Eve, with the plucked apple in its mouth (No. 180), occurs in Lucas van Leyden's design on the same subject. The bat's wings with which Satan was depicted in his "Triumphing over Job" (No. 150) are appended to a demon in one of the frescoes relating to the history of Job in the Campo Santo of Pisa. General and specific resemblances of composition and manner were elsewhere evident, e.g., between the designs for "The Last Judgment" (Nos. 68 and 70) and Michel Angelo's in the Sistine Chapel; the design for "Jacob's Dream" (No. 154) and Raffaelle's in the Loggie. The grouping and attitudes of the figures in "The Crucifixion" and "The Entry into Jerusalem" coincided with the conventional treatment of these subjects by successive Italian and German schools.

Of self-repetition the examples seemed to us well nigh innumerable. Only a few can be cited. The design of "Elohim

Malkin's "Father's Memoirs of a Child," p. 20.