ury. She chiefly distinguished herself in portraiture, and f history correctly reports, she was the rage in the fashonable world of her time, princes, cardinals and noble Roman ladies, vying with each other to become her sitters. She was made painter in ordinary by Pope Gregory XIII. And now we come to the noblest name among the women artists of the seventeenth century,

ELISABETTA SIRANI.

Perhaps no artist that ever lived accomplished more within a life of only twenty-five years duration, than Elisabetta Sirani. Born in Bologna about the middle of the seventeenth century, she enjoyed the instruction of some of the most gifted masters of Italy, since Raphael and Correggio, especially Guido Reni. So high did her reputation as a painter rise in the estimation of her contemporaries, that she was called the "Raphael of women." There is little reason to doubt that her early death was the result of murderous malice; and the most credible supposition is that she was poisoned through professional jealousy, a thing quite common in that age, of which we have a notable instance in the untimely taking off of Dominichino, by his great rival Ribora, or his jealous pupils.

It was on the 14th of Nov. 1665, that the body of this gifted woman, whose youth gave promise rarely equaled in the history of genius, was followed by a great procession of weeping mourners to the church of St. Dominico in Bologna, where her obsequies were celebrated. In the little chapel of the Madonna del Rosario, which this church contains, her mortal remains repose beside the dust of Guido Reni, her illustrious master. In her brief life, according to her own testimony, she had executed one hundred and fifty pictures. One of the noblest of her works is

ST. ANTHONY OF PODENA ADORING THE INFANT CHRIST.

This painting, which takes rank with the first creations of Christian art in the seventeenth century, now hangs in the Pinacothek of her native city Bologna, whose chief glory, you will remember, is the "Ecstasy of St. Cecilia," by Raphael. Perhaps the noblest rendering in paint of a theme kindred to this one, is that grand picture by Murillo in the cathedral at Seville, representing this holy man on his knees, in the act of welcoming the infant Christ, descending amid an escort of angels from the clouds. Here we see the saint imprinting the kiss of devout affection upon the feet of the child of Bethlehem, whom the Virgin Mother holds in her lap. The subject of the great Spanish painter and of the gifted woman, whose creation we here behold, is essentially one and the same, and who shall say that this work is unworthy to keep company with the masterpiece of Seville, and with that great multitude of painted saints which illustrate the piety and chivalry of faith, and glorify the Olympus of Christian art.

The eighteenth century, which witnessed the decadence of art all over the continent of Europe, and its rise in the British Isle, furnished to history the name of three women of great renown in the annals of painting. These are Rosalba Carriera, Angelica Kauffman, and Elizabeth Le Brun.

ROSALBA CARRIERA

had a reputation co-extensive with the European continent as a portrait painter, and numbered among her patrons almost all the leading contemporary princes of her time. She was elected a member of the academies of Rome, Bologna and Paris, and her name justly deserves a place of honor and renown in the record which the ages have written of woman's achievements in art. Mrs. Jamison calls her the finest crayon painter that ever lived.

And now we come to a woman whose name is probably better known than that of any other in the whole history of art:

ANGELICA KAUFFMAN.

The story of woman in the works of literature and art, has large mixtures of tragedy in it, and impartial history has often given us the picture of broken hearts and blighted hopes in the association with the noblest achievements of genius. Of this sad and startling contrast, Angelica Kauffman furnishes an example. Her picture occupies a conspicuous place in that most illustrious collection of artist portraits which the world contains, in the Pitti palace at Florence. We see, to employ the language of Rossi, "A woman still in the bloom of life, but destitute of all brilliancy of coloring, with an expression grave and pensive almost to melancholy. She is seated on a stone in the midst of a solitary landscape, a portfolio with sketches in one hand, and a pencil in the other. The attitude is unstudied almost to negligence. There is no attempt at display; you feel as you look on her, that every thought is absorbed in her vocation." Her portrait represents the artist as a woman past forty, just after her marriage with Antonino Zucchi, a Venetian painter, in the year 1781. The bright dreams of youth had long been dissipated in the most crushing and humiliating experience which can fall upon a woman, her marriage to and separation from a bigamist and villain, who, during her long residence in England, where she was the pride of rank and royalty, won her hand under an assumed title. The story is one of the saddest in the records of genius, and the fact that after such a mental convulsion, she was capable of producing some of her noblest works, constitutes almost a miracle of character and endurance. Time would fail me to rehearse the career of this remarkable woman, who was born in the middle of the eighteenth century, some biographers say at Coire, in the canton of Grisons, Switzerland, others at Schwartzenberg. She divided the greater part of her productive life between England and Italy, and is thus claimed by four nationalities, Swiss, German, English and Italian. She was the friend of Winckelman and Goethe, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.; the favorite painter of popes, and cardinals, and kings, and queens.

Probably no woman who ever sought to occupy a niche in the temple of art, had a loftier ambition, a more illustrious patronage, and it must be added, a more fiery baptism of personal suffering than Angelica Kauffman. Goethe wrote of her: "No living painter excels her in dignity, or in the delicate taste with which she handles the pencil." When we read his fulsome flattery, we have to consider, in the first place, that it was written in an age almost destitute of artists of first rank, and second, that this is not the first instance of gallantry and tender sentiment overmastering the judgment of a great intellect, and exaggerating the qualities of a woman. Angelica Kauffman attempted enough in composition and painting to place her name alongside of Raphael, and no artist among women more forcibly illustrates the incapability of her sex to achieve great results in the highest realms of art, which correspond to the epic in literature, than does she. If ever a woman had the ambition and the opportunity to rise to the highest artistic level which man has attained, that woman was Angelica Kauffman. Only let one read the titles of her one hundred historical, classical, and religious paintings, as they are found in Miss Clayton's "Biography of English Female Artists," and one would expect to find the "Odyssey" and "Eneid," the Mariolatry of the middle ages, the four gospels and all the poets of the ages in paint. Neither Raphael nor Michael Angelo, nor any other painter of the renaissance can show such an extensive list of works whose successful treatment demanded the highest skill in composition. And yet not one of all these hundred has attained a world-wide fame, and while admitting the undoubted talent of the artist, and her high rank among women who have handled the pencil and the palette, we are compelled to look upon

MYRETURN TO ARCADY, AND HOW I FIND THINGS LOOKING.*

[The author of the following article gives the reader a bird's-eye view of rural life in the eastern part of England. It is true to the present times and to the history of the past; besides, it is written in a romantic style.-Editor THE CHAUTAUQUAN.]

It is just a quarter of a century since I resigned the curacy of a country parish in the east of England-where I had spent seven years of rural felicity and, let me hope, pastoral usefulness-and became a dweller in the streets. During the twenty-five years that have passed since then I have been emphatically a townsman; all my surroundings have been those of town life-my sympathies have been appealed to by town people, and, where I have been brought into relation with the so-called working classes, these have been artisans whose days were passed in the workshops of the city, not tillers of the soil and tenders of the herds.

In the autumn of 1879 I was presented to the benefice I now hold. My friends all prophesied that I should find myself buried, and die of dullness, but they were wrong. I have found no difficulty in throwing myself into the new life or must I call it the old life?—of a country parson with real zest, and my return to my first love has brought with it such an abundant measure of fresh and pure delight as arouses in me more thankfulness than surprise.

But retaining, as I do, a vivid recollection of my seven years' apprenticeship in a country village; in that bygone age when the four-horse coaches were not yet quite extinct -when the reaping machine was scarcely known-when the old men growled at the rapacity of the farmers who mowed their wheat instead of getting it hacked down with the sickle—when our parish was looked upon as extraordinarily favored, because it had a day school with a grown man, and a well-trained one, to teach the little ones-when there were church rates and a breakfast table groaning under the burden of taxation-and when we country folks used to brew our own beer and gazed with awe upon the rich rector who offered us claret after dinner, yondering how any income could stand it; I am profoundly sensible of the change that has passed over village life since those early days, and, though some years off sixty still, I find myself in the position of Rip Van Winkel, or the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, the position of one who has been slumbering for half a lifetime in some old familiar haunts, and who has suddenly awoke to discover that the "old order," with which he was so familiar, has passed away, and a new order become established.

If at the outset I seem to adopt a slightly egotistical tone, I must beg my reader to bear with me. A man's views on most subjects are inevitably tinged by the circumstances under which he makes his first start in life, and the opportunities he then enjoys of forming a correct estimate of his neighbors' habits and rules of conduct, and he who undertakes to express an opinion upon the moral or economical status of any class of the community, may reasonably be called upon to show his credentials and to exhibit some evidence of his qualification for the office of critic. "What does this man know about it?" is a question that people who are found fault with are sure to ask.

I held the curacy of X- for seven years under a man whose like I shall never see again. He was rich, he was cultured, he was devout; his life was passed in a loftier region of thought and aspiration than common men can wot of; but he was a philanthropist in advance of his time, who carried out into practice in a remote country village what other people were dreaming of, making speeches or writing books about, and getting to be considered great thinkers for Augustus Jessopp in "Nineteenth Century."

taking such "large ideas" into their heads. He owned every acre of land in the parish, and if any human being ever realized the ideal of George Herbert's country parson, the rector of X-was that man. I have the best authority for saying that during those seven years when I was curate at X- the whole rent of the estate was spent upon improvements:-I think every cottage in the parish was rebuilt-many new ones were added-roads were made-land

was drained-schools were erected-the church rebuilt from the foundations; and, in the meantime, if the people were not all they ought to have been, it was not because all was not done to make them so, and I am bound to add, it was not because it was not made worth their while to be so.

Our dear friend was a guileless saint, whose whole soul was bent on raising us to his own level-but, alas! it was too high pressure for most of us-he did raise us-but oh! such a little way. The neighbors did not like it. I often used to hear a sneer or a growl from those that ought to have known better. "The X- people were spoilt and spoiling others— they were not laborers at all. Many of them had actually an acre of land at a pound a year; the fellows actually kept donkey carts, and as for their cottages-what! three bedrooms and no lodgers allowed-why, not even a gardener or a gamekeeper would expect it-and then look at them, too why, one of the fellows came to our church, last Sunday, with a real good great-coat!"

With the charge of X-, where the rector did at least half the work, I assisted also as curate of the neighboring parish of Y. Here I had a very different sort of place to look after. In only one respect was Y——— a more desirable parish; it was a happy Goshen on the gravel-X—— was on the clay; in all other respects it was a dismal contrast to its neighbor. 'Squire there was none, nor anything like a gentleman, save the rector; the land belonged to many owners, the farms were small and ill cultivated; the laborers' dwellings were mean and high-rented, and all belonged to small, needy proprietors; there was a good deal of noisy drunkenness-sometimes a fight, now and then a case of wife-beating; the village doctor lived seven miles off, though there was always fever, ague, and English cholera hanging about the place, and I had a great deal of dispensing to do, which I did with an audacity, careless of consequences, such as now makes me shudder to remember. "Did you really give a tumbler of soap and water to that child with the croup?" said my dear rector to me once in his gentle way. "What was I to do? I had no ipecacuanha!" So the little maiden lived, and next winter stared with her round eyes while I emptied twelve grains of calomel on to a penny piece and turned it over on her father's tongue and cured him of the cholera. "Any salivating?”— We never thought of that. Without hesitating, I should have met such a case with rhubarb and magnesia! Sometimes a farmer would come to me sheepishly, early in the morning, with a new agreement which he was going to present to his landlord, as illiterate as himself. I used to correct the spelling, or point out a weak point, or offered this or that mild suggestion. Once or twice a family jar put two households at war, and there was a talk of going to law. We settled it by "holding a court," after a fashion, in my diminutive study, where once I remember fourteen men and women came and quarrelled and bawled for two hours, but ended by shaking hands, some tears being shed and some very strong language being used in the meantime. But there was always cordiality toward the young parson, whom the and was supposed to be able to understand the difficulties of The result

people trusted because he was known to be very poor,

making two ends meet on ten shillings a week.

was that during those seven years I was on the most intimate terms with farmers and laborers. Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless a fact, that I have even been consulted

by a good old ranting preacher about the kind of sermon he ought to preach from a cart at the next camp-meeting, and that my experience ranged from writing a letter to making a will, and from setting a bone to stopping a suicide.

I mention all these matters because I hold that it is hardly possible for a man who has once been en rapport with any class to lose altogether that subtle faculty-call it power or call it knack-of making his way with that class, however long the interval may be during which he is separated from it; and I find that, as far as my "getting on" with the peasantry is concerned, that comes to me as easily and naturally as if there had never been any solution of continuity-making due allowance for the inevitable something which handicaps any one who comes as a stranger into a parish when he is in the fifties, as compared with him who comes when he is in the twenties. It is pretty much the sort of difference that one is conscious of at times in the saddle; I can ride just as well as I could thirty years ago, but I can't fall as well as I could in the old days.

Having said thus much by way of preamble, I proceed to offer the reader my impressions of what strike me as the most notable changes in country life which have come about during my absence from Arcadia.

The change in the face of the country generally is so patent as to require only a few words. The small fields that used to be so picturesque and so wasteful-where one could botanize with so much interest and pick up all sorts of odd pieces of information-have gone or are rapidly going; the tall hedges, the high banks, the scrub or the bottoms where a fox or a weasel might find a night's lodgings, the bye-lanes where the gipsics' tent used to pitch, where one could learn Romaney words, and, if we were very liberal and very wary, even listen to a Romaney's song and the scraping of his fiddle-all these things have vanished-"been done away with, sir!" and nobody can tell you by what authority these reforms have been brought about: the rustics don't like to talk about it. But the broad tilths are as clean as gardens, and the face of the land looks up at you with a shiney, luxurious self-complacency, suggesting sometimes rather a smirk than a smile.

All this has been brought about by a huge expenditure of capital, such as the farmers, whom I knew in my earlier Arcadian days, certainly had not at their command. The money has been brought in by men who were not simple sons of the soil-retired publicans and commercial travellers, town shopkeepers, and those intelligent and pushing gentlemen, yelept salesmen; or young men whose fathers have left them a few thousands and a defective education, with no particular vocation for anything and no opening anywhere, men of no vices, no culture, and no tastes, but perfectly respectable, often sometimes more, and with a desire to settle and do something, and live a simple life with outdoor pursuits in the pure country air.

The rural districts have benefitted largely by this outpouring of money, but they have lost something, too. The shopkeepers in the market-towns have been enormous gainers and have grown rich, their enterprise has met with its reward; the country lawyers have increased and multiplied and thriven exceedingly; the bankers have had a good time of it; the landlords' rents have risen largely; the laborer's wages have gone up, and his luxuries have multiplied surprisingly. But the small farmers have grown fewer and fewer, their homesteads have fallen into decay or been pulled down, they and their families have been thrust outdriven off to America, or New Zealand, or Australia, and their places know them no more; the village shopkeepers have almost been improved off the face of the earth, and last, not least, the country clergy are relatively to their neighbors much poorer than they were, and are in process of becoming seriously impoverished.

Let us deal first with those who have suffered loss by the revolution that has gone on.

I leave to those who are our accepted teachers in the science of political economy the question of the comparative cheapness of large and small farms. I am even ready to concede something. Small farms do mean expensive buildings to keep up, do mean that the occupier is for the most part a needy, struggling man, do mean that he often lacks sufficient capital to cultivate his land to the best advantage. But they mean something else, too. They mean that in those unpretending homesteads, where there are always some repairs needed which the landlord shakes his head at, there are to be found habitual thrift, sobriety, and self-denial; they mean boys and girls brought up in a rigorous school of toil; they mean few accomplishments, no drawing-rooms, small book learning, and "good old idees of what's right and what ain't;" they mean that under those thatched roofs whose eaves have offered the swallows summer refuge for a century or more, two or three generations of frugal peasants have brought up their families, and yet paid their way, and could do it now if you wrung from them only as much rent as their fathers paid in the best times, or asked only as many shillings an acre as the big man on the other side of the hedge pays for his far larger holding. These people are the only people left among us who are witnesses for the rugged virtue growing, alas! so rare, the only people who are not so hasty to get rich that they can not afford to be honest, the only people who do not scorn manual labor as degrading, and who do not pretend to think one man or one place as good as another, who-poor simpletons!-still passionately love the land of their fathers

With love far brought

From out the storied past and used within the present; and who, when compelled to make room for some go-ahead capitalist at last, turn their backs upon the old place with many a sigh, and not seldom a sob, puzzled, ashamed, and bitter at heart, with a sense of wrong, and possessed by the conviction that the devil and man have been against them or they would never have been "turned out of the old home."

Happily, however, the small farmers have not all been got rid of; they always have had a hard time of it, but, strange to say, they are not the people who have suffered most from the bad harvests of the past few years. The "gentleman farmer," whose pride was to carry on agriculture on the grand scale, finds that he has burnt his fingers— and if he has done only that he is fortunate-the small occupant holds on. The explanation is to be sought in the fact that the one must needs be, to a great extent, in the power of his subordinate; the other finds his shepherd, cowkeeper, and yardman in his own household, and so keeps his labor bill at the lowest possible figure, while at the same time the quality of the labor supplied is the best that can be secured. The small man, too, is by nature and long habit, cautious, thrifty, and slow to launch out into expense when things are going well; he has a horror of being behindhand at the bankers'; indeed he has some reluctance to have dealings with a bank at all, his credit does not stand so high that he is ever tempted to trade far beyond his capital. He is never too proud to make a profit out of anything, however trifling. What does the big man care for cocks and hens? He will tell you they are more trouble than they are worth. He eats the eggs for breakfast and the chickens for dinner, goes in for fancy breeds, and runs up an ornamental “walk” for them; he likes to look at them, or to see his name among the competitors at the next poultry show. He keeps a gardener too, and exhibits his roses against the country. "Sell my vegetables ?" said one of them to me, with some warmth. "I'm not brought to that yet. Do you take me for a nurseryman?"

I am far from insinuating that these gentlemen have not a right to do all this, for why should an agriculturist who has embarked ten thousand pounds in the stocking of his farm not have his amusements as well as the tradesman, with far less to fall back upon? But this I do say, that the land never could support-never will support-two gentlemanly households. If the landlord is to live in luxury out of the rent, the tenant must not expect to do so too: one or the other must come down. Meanwhile the occupier of sixty or one hundred acres lives by his hen-house, his ducks, and his pigstye; his garden is not often an ornamental parterre, but at any rate it brings in a trifle. He eats no eggs-it would be eating money. He shambles to the next brewery with any beast of burden that can jiggle along and fetches his load of grains, which he tells you solemnly have reached an unconscionable price now -even sixpence a bushel. His wife or daughter takes her basket of butter to the next market, or gets rid of the apples or the cabbages, or turns an honest penny by the flowers. The big man tells you that geese and turkeys don't pay. Of course they don't, if for weeks you have to pay a lad a shilling a day to look after the one, and the others have to take their chance against the rats. But little Jem puts his little soul into it when he is bidden to keep an eye on mother's "guslings," and it is as good as a play to him to fetch home the truant turkeys when they have marched off to forbidden lands, or to find out where that speckled hen has got her nest-she who will do things on the sly.

"How do you manage to pay all your outgoings in these bad times?” I said to one good woman whose husband farms some fifty acres at a ruinous rent. "Why, you see, sir, the corn about pays the landlord and sich, and then we reckon to live, and there's seven of us, and we all help. I don't know how we do, but we keep going!"

I should think that "the landlord and sich" would absorb all that this good man could make out of his stackyard in the best years, and yet he "gets along," and is so muddleheaded, poor creature! as to be possessed by the notion that seven mouths to fill implies seven pairs of hands to toil, and has been so deplorably educated that he cannot get rid of the old world prejudice that "children and the fruit of the womb are an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord." And so those luxuries which the big man consumes and tells you he takes no account of, the small man lives by. They constitute his margin of profit; and whereas half a dozen bad years take all the large occupier's corn to pay the "landlord and sich," and, bringing him in face of a deficiency, force him back upon his capital or his banker to enable him to keep up the pace which he knows not how to slack-for are we not all children of habit?-the smaller man is only a little worse off than he was before. They must be sorry harvests indeed when we can not make up for bad corn crops by getting some "turn of luck," as he calls it, from his poultry, his vegetables, or his dairy. "I bless the Lord for one thing, as I heard you say, Doctor, though it warn't in no sermon!" said one of them to me the other day. "What was that?" I asked. "Why! didn't you tell me last winter as the coppers ain't all tails ?''

And yet these are the men whom economists and agents and capitalists are combining to oust from their holdings. Nevertheless they are the very salt of the earth, and among them are to be found not only the best, but almost the only remaining specimens of the slow, silent, stolid, sturdy English yeoman, whom you may knock about all day and all night, but who will never suspect that he is getting beaten till you squeeze the life out of him by lifting him from his mother earth, and who never will confess that he can be beaten as long as you "fight fair!" To worry such a class as this from their ramshackle little houses, where their fathers planted the apple trees and their mothers the honeysuckle

that sprawls about the porch, is to my mind to commit a a crime which, in addition to all the rest of my sins, I should be sorry to have to answer for at the bar of God! Another class who have been losers by the changes that have been in operation, is the class of village tradesmen. I am afraid they will find it hard to enlist any pity, and yet they deserve some; their disappearance is surely to be regretted, and they are disappearing rapidly. The increased facilities of locomotion must be credited with much of the loss of custom which has driven these men out-much, but not all. The abolition of the turnpikes has been to the village shopkeepers a far more serious blow than the world generally supposes. The grocer from the town sends round his cart day by day, and pays no vexatious sixpence. The pushing draper establishes an "agency" at convenient distances, and contributes nothing to the highways which he uses so largely. He grumbles loudly at the borough rates, but he grumbles more loudly if the roads are "rotten." If a rolling stone trips up the high-stepping mare that tools him along through the village street, the local newspaper soon hears of it, and the public are assured that the country can not stand the negligence of the surveyors. Meanwhile it is the village huckster who has to pay his heavy quota towards the rate, and, if the townsman who competes with him saves ten pounds a year in sixpences, somebody has had the burden shifted on to his shoulders.

I remember the time when among the most enterprising and intelligent of the peasantry there were always two careers open: the one was the hiring of "a bit of land" large enough to keep a horse and a cow or two; the other was the setting up a shop where even in old age an honest frugal couple might make a livelihood and never be forced to go on the parish.

I seldom hear of any one looking forward to the former of these possible careers. I never find any one inclined to venture upon the latter.

There is yet another class who have been no gainers by the great dissemination of money throughout the rural districts. The country parson is a much poorer man than he was. Not that his mere household expenses, the cost of mere food and raiment, have necessarily increased (except so far as the dying out of frugality and simplicity has to answer for the multiplication of his wants), for, though butcher's meat and labor are enhanced in price, almost everything else is cheaper than in my early Arcadian days-but the parson's expenses now are outside of his house, not in it, and if he have half a dozen children, then his troubles begin. There are no more free passes for boys and girls, no nominations to this or that well-endowed school, no close exhibitions at the universities, no patronage to this or that post. "Open competition" has thrown all the good things into the laps of the wealthy. What chance has an average boy bred up in a country parsonage against another who from childhood has had all the advantages of the very best and most careful training that is to be found upon the face of the earth? "Poor country clergymen are none the better for being poor," they are rudely told: "the country does not want to help the needy, but the meritorious." It is as if admission to the pool of Bethesda could only be obtained by a doctor's certificate that the sturdy patient was not afflicted with any disease.

Moreover, there is one source of income which has almost entirely gone from the clergy since my younger days: I mean tuition. It used to be taken for granted that every country clergyman was a scholar, and in the main this was true. Relatively to the rest of the community I do not hesitate to say that thirty years ago a country parson was a better educated man than his neighbors. The schools through-out the length and breadth of the land were in a very unsatisfactory state, and needed the overhauling which they have