“ ART GALLERIES. An art gallery (by which, as distinguished from more general Museums of Art, q.v., is here meant one specially for pictures) epitomizes so many phases of human thought and imagination that it connotes much more than a mere collection of paintings. In its technical and aesthetic aspect the gallery shows the treatment of colour, form and composition. In its historical aspect we find the true portraits of great men of the past ”

“ And the lasting merit of d’Annunzio, his real value to the literature of his country, consists precisely in that he opened up the closed mine of its former life as a source of inspiration for the present and of hope for the future, and created a language, neither pompous nor vulgar, drawn from every source and district suited to the requirements of modern thought, yet absolutely classical, borrowed from none, and, independently of the thought it may be used to express, a thing of intrinsic beauty. ”

“ I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. The same applies to Hindus, Greeks, Romans Germans, Celts and Slaves. When I speak of them I commit myself to no anatomical characteristics. The blue-eyed and fair-haired Scandinavians may have been conquerors or conquered, they may have adopted the language of their darker lords or their subjects, or vice versa. I assert nothing beyond their language when I call them Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts and Slaves ”

“ Even when he jests, he never compromises his dignity; and in pathetic description or narrative he excites the reader’s deepest feelings. In his machinery he displays a vivacity of fancy with which no other poet can vie; but he never lets his fancy carry him so far as to omit to employ, with an art peculiar to himself, those simple and natural pencil-strokes which, by imparting to the most extraordinary feats a colour of reality, satisfy the reason without disenchanting the imagination. ”

“ In physique, the Asturians are like the Galicians, a people of hardy mountaineers and fishermen, finely built, but rarely handsome, and with none of the grace of the Castilian or Andalusian. Unlike the Galicians, however, they are remarkable for their keen spirit of independence, which has been fostered by centuries of isolation. Despite the harsh land-laws and grinding taxation which prevent them, with all their industry and thrift, from securing the freehold of the patch of ground cultivated by each peasant family, the Asturians regard themselves as the aristocracy of Spain. ”

“ Jason is a propitiating god of health, Medea a goddess akin to Hera; Aeetes is connected with the Colchian sun-worship. Forchhammer saw in it an old nature symbolism; Jason, the god of healing and fruitfulness, brought the fleece—the fertilizing rain-cloud—to the western land that was parched by the heat of the sun. Others treat it as a solar myth; the ram is the light of the sun, the flight of Phrixus and the death of Helle signify its setting, the recovery of the fleece its rising again. ”

“ D’Anville’s studies embraced everything of geographical nature in the world’s literature, as far as he could master it: for this purpose he not only searched ancient and modern historians, travellers and narrators of every description, but also poets, orators and philosophers. One of his cherished objects was to reform geography by putting an end to the blind copying of older maps, by testing the commonly accepted positions of places through a rigorous examination of all the descriptive authority, and by excluding from cartography every name inadequately supported. ”

“ The machine production of an industrial century had laid its iron hands upon what had formerly been the exclusive province of the handicraftsman, who only lingered on in a few obscure trades and in forgotten corners of England for the most part. The ideal of mechanical perfection dominated British workmen, and the factory system, first by extreme division of labour, and then by the further specialization of the workman under machine production, left no room for individual artistic feeling among craftsmen trained and working under such conditions. ”

“ The character of Apuleius, as delineated by himself, is attractive; he appears vehement and passionate, but devoid of rancour; enterprising, munificent, genial and an enthusiast for the beautiful and good. His vanity and love of display are conspicuous, but are extenuated by a genuine thirst for knowledge and a surprising versatility of attainments. He prided himself on his proficiency in both Greek and Latin. His place in letters is accidentally more important than his genius strictly entitles him to hold. ”

“ ANTITHESIS (the Greek for “setting opposite”) , in rhetoric, the bringing out of a contrast in the meaning by an obvious contrast in the expression, as in the following:—“When there is need of silence, you speak, and when there is need of speech, you are dumb; when present, you wish to be absent, and when absent, you desire to be present; in peace you are for war, and in war you long for peace; in council you descant on bravery, and in the battle you tremble.” ”

“ In the hands of the Greeks and of the later Egyptians both astrology and astronomy were carried far beyond the limits attained by the Babylonians, and it is indeed a matter of surprise to observe the harmonious combination of the two fields—a harmony that seems to grow more complete with each age, and that is not broken until we reach the threshold of modern science in the 16th century. To the Greek astronomer Hipparchus belongs the credit of the discovery (c. 130 B.C.) of the theory of the precession of the equinoxes, for a knowledge of which among the Babylonians we find no definite proof ”

“ Under the conditions of the present day the distinction of aristocracy, democracy and monarchy cannot be rigidly maintained from a purely governmental point of view. In no case does the sovereign power in a state reside any longer in an aristocracy, and the word has acquired a social rather than a political sense as practically equivalent to “nobility,” though the distinction is sometimes drawn between the “aristocracy of birth” and the “aristocracy of wealth.” Modern history, however, furnishes many examples of government in the hands of an aristocracy. ”

“ ARÊTE (O. Fr. areste, Lat. arista, ear of corn, fish-bone or spine) , a ridge or sharp edge; a French term used in Switzerland to denote the sharp bayonet-like edge of a mountain (such as the Matterhorn) , that slopes steeply upward with two precipitous sides meeting in a long ascending ridge. ”

“ If we cut away the mass of mere fiction which Philostratus accumulated, we have left a highly imaginative, earnest reformer who laboured to infuse into the flaccid dialectic of paganism a saner spirit of practical morality. ”