Various

“ Prosperity has not made us forget or disregard our rights. The wonderful development of our railway communications and our steam navigation, the extension of our commerce, the pacification of India, the colonisation of Africa, ought to have shown the Emperor of Russia that we have not yet fallen from our high estate in the political or moral world. The mighty fleets and the gallant bands of warriors that are even now conveying to him our answer to his insolent defiance, will show him the magnitude of his error. ”

“ Expediency has taken the place of honour, and perhaps of integrity. To say one thing and mean another not only meets with no reprobation, but is justified and applauded. Statesmen make sham speeches and false promises; politicians bribe and are bribed. Is it likely that High art, whose essential being is good, great, and noble, and, beyond all, truth, should find a real love among such? We deny not exceptions, we speak of that which prevails. View the large and important class, the manufacturing, the great fabricators of wealth—they are encouragers of art, but of what quality? ”

“ It is to us matter of pride and congratulation to know that, in the coming struggle, the colours of Britain and France will be displayed side by side. But we detest war, for its own sake, as fervently as any member of the Peace Society can do, and we are perfectly alive to the awful consequences which it entails. What we wish is, that the public should not misapprehend the real cause of the present rupture of the peace of Europe. That it originally arose from the exorbitant ambition of the Czar, is beyond all question ”

“ We ought to be glad to learn from any who know better than ourselves, but we very much question if our perpetual appeal to the practice of foreign galleries, in the way in which it is made, is at all a healthy sign. We are not sure that some of the examples we seek may not rather be warnings. It is a confession of imbecility and mistrust in themselves of trustees and commissioners. Foreign architects, foreign directors, and foreign galleries, bear too prominent a part in our blue-books and our pamphlets. We are confident in our own men, if not in the “intelligent public.” ”

“ Under such circumstances it is material to examine what is the amount of interruption to the commerce of the country, which may be assumed as likely to occur, as the result of a state of war with Russia. What, in other words, is the amount and the nature of the pressure, to which the masses of our population may be called upon to submit, to prepare them for the purposes of those persons—happily few in number at present—whose voice is for peace at any sacrifice of the national honour, and any sacrifice of the sacred duties of humanity? ”

“ Few persons who have been in Paris will have failed to notice, when walking round the Palais Royal between two and three in the afternoon, or seven and nine in the evening, a shrivelled weary-looking man, standing just within the railings that separate the gallery from the garden, and continually repeating, in a tone between a whine, a chant, and a croak, a monotonous formula, at first not very intelligible to a foreigner. ”

“ Whatever be the claims of that prince to the character of a prophet, it is evident that Russia is now approaching a more important crisis. Russia will give way, or she will not. If the former, her prestige is gone, and the pettiest Continental kingdom may regard her with indifference. If the latter, a more terrible fate may await her, for she can scarcely resist all that is powerful in Europe combined against her. Russia has been to Europe, for the last forty years, what a ball remaining in an old wound is to the limb of a veteran. ”

“ We cannot think a gallery perfect without them. We would have a portion set apart especially for copies of the best works, and also for prints. In them we might have the designs, and the light and shade, the great and beautiful ideas represented: and here we cannot but lament, that the perfection to which the art of engraving has been brought should in this country be given up to inferior and almost to worthless things. Our engravings indicate the public taste, the causes of the low state of which we have already remarked upon. ”

“ One sea of sand succeeds another; and were it not for an occasional mirage, which for a time diverts them, or, for the circumstance that the glaring sun and drifting sand-clouds compels them sometimes for hours together to envelop their faces in the bornoos, or cloak, so that they are able to dream of the fantastic groups of date-trees, and the gentle rivulets winding amongst them in their native land, their journey through such portions of the Desert would be the most intolerable and dreary imaginable. ”

“ The Czar is a remarkably able man—we question whether, politically speaking, he is not the ablest man in Europe—but his own extraordinary position precludes him from understanding the effect of public opinion in such a country as our own. He is accustomed to deal with Cabinets, not with nations or parliaments; and he attributes more power to the former than they possess, at least according to the constitution of Great Britain. The British Cabinet cannot, like that of Prussia or Austria, commit the country to a course which is inconsistent with or derogatory to its honour. ”

“ To change of opinion, where honestly induced and through conviction, every one is bound to be fair and lenient; because, undeniably, in our own day there has been a great unravelment of social questions, and mere party prejudice is no longer allowed to be paramount. Perhaps the only living statesman of eminence, who cleaves to the old system, and is inveterate in his addiction to party intrigue, and what he calls “tradition,” is Lord John Russell. Put him into Utopia, and his first thought would be how he might establish the exclusive supremacy of the Whigs. ”

“ Already our choicest troops have left our shores for the Mediterranean, inspired by the cheers and accompanied by the blessing of many hundreds of thousands of their fellow-countrymen, who, for the first time in their lives, have witnessed so solemn yet exciting a spectacle. Already has a noble fleet sailed for the waters of the Baltic, to sweep that inland sea, and to launch its thunders against the foe. ”

“ The intelligent public of this country are daily becoming more alive to the truth, which has long been recognised by other enlightened nations, that the arts of design cannot be properly studied or rightly appreciated by means of insulated specimens alone; that, in order to understand or profit by the great works, either of ancient or modern schools of art, it is necessary to contemplate the genius which produced them, not merely in its final results, but in the mode of its operation—in its rise and progress, as well as in its perfection. ”

“ It is to be, not art, but a history of art, to be shown by “specimens;” nor will it do to bring a brick even from Babylon as a specimen of its architecture. The public may rejoice in its ruin, or it would have to be brought in bodily, and a hundred or two crystal palaces added to our wonder of the world; as it is, there must be an “hiatus maxime deflendus.” We should have architecture, and “specimens” of architects of all the several countries and schools, as of pictures and painters. ”

“ By the blessing of a bountiful Providence, clothing our fields and those of Western Europe and America with luxuriant harvests, we may this year be snatched from our position of dependence upon the growth of an enemy’s soil for the food of our people, and be enabled to enter upon a period of plenty and cheapness, instead of that scarcity and high prices of all the necessaries of life from which we have been suffering during the past twelve months—certainly without such suffering being attributable to a state of war, or to any but ordinary causes. ”

“ I need hardly say that Cassandrino, although a churchman, is not bound by monastic rules—is in fact a layman—but I would wager that there is not a spectator who does not invest him in imagination with a cardinal’s red cap, or at least with the violet stockings of a monsignore. The monsignori are, it is well known, the young men of the papal court; it is the place that leads to all others. Rome is full of monsignori of Cassandrino’s age, who have their fortune still to make, and who seek amusement whilst waiting for the cardinal’s hat. Cassandrino is the hero of innumerable little plays. ”

“ Within the oasis of Tozar, and its date-forest, are half-a-dozen villages, besides four marabouts with their cupolas, around each of which are a few huts. The houses of the Desert are generally only one storey high, and are built, like those of Cafsa, of bricks, with rafters of palm-wood. The interior of the houses is as humble as their exterior. The rooms are long and narrow, with only a hole here and there to admit the light; and from the rafters of the ceiling of every apartment is suspended the stock of dates which, with milk, forms the principal articles alike of food and of commerce. ”

“ It is rather singular that it should not have struck so astute a man as Mr Cobden, that Russia is very likely to feel the loss of so excellent a customer as England appears to have been to her, quite as much as we are likely to feel the want of her tallow, her flax and hemp, her linseed, or even her wheat. The vendor of an article is generally the party who feels most aggrieved when his stock is permitted to accumulate upon his shelves. The Russian landowners cannot very conveniently dispense with the annual thirteen millions sterling which they draw from this country. ”

“ The arrogant envoy of Russia rendered an essential service, not to his imperial master, but to his intended victim. His insults roused the dormant spirit of the Mussulman. The Ottoman army was undisciplined—unprovided with the commonest necessaries; the navy was but the melancholy remnant of Navarino; the Sultan’s authority was weakened by internal abuses and disorders; his territory dismembered by the separation of Greece, and by the all but successful rebellion of Egypt. Those to whom he looked for aid or protection against his colossal foe were long cold, if not hostile to him ”

“ But, wonderful as are the changes which we have seen of late years in the views of public men, this is the most astounding of them all. Never before, perhaps, did a statesman pass such a decided censure on his own judgment, or make such an admission of former recklessness and error. If he is right now, he must have been utterly wrong before. The constitution of 1852, as he would have made it, must have been a bad one. One-tenth of the members of the House of Commons would still have been returned by constituencies which he now regards as unfit to be constituencies any more. ”

“ It cannot be denied that in many places, especially large towns, there is an immense degree of apathy on the part of those who are entitled to the franchise. Men who are in the possession or occupation of property far more than sufficient to entitle them to vote, do not even take the pains to place themselves on the roll; and many of those who are on the roll will not give themselves the trouble to vote. It is remarkable also that these are generally men of wealth, station, and intelligence—belonging, in short, to the class most likely to use the franchise with discretion and independence. ”

“ She has, as her active ally, the greatest military nation in the world, whose soldiers and sailors are about, for the first time for many centuries, to fight side by side against a common enemy. Little as we are disposed to decry the strength of that navy which Russia, by her wonderful energy, has succeeded in creating during the past few years, it would be absurd to compare it with the magnificent fleets which England and France combined have at present floating in the waters of the Black Sea, and about to sail for the Baltic. ”

“ If the noble lord is of opinion that, notwithstanding all which we have heard and seen, he has still power and reputation enough to head an independent party—let him leave the Cabinet, and then, as a plain member of Parliament, he may pledge himself to his heart’s content. But while he remains a minister and servant of the Crown, he is bound to maintain the dignity of his position, and preserve a due decorum, instead of acting like a popularity-hunter and a partisan. ”

“ We shall make a great mistake indeed, if we are led by Mr Dyce as an authority, to pass contempt upon either the works of, or the admiration felt for, the genius of the greatest men in art—if we put chronological series in competition with excellence. He overdoes his part, and can gain nothing by such language as this:—“Turgid, unmeaning panegyrics of Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Titian, Correggio, and the rest.” These “and the rest” are such pre-eminently great masters, that, in some shape or other, we would have their works ever before the public. ”

“ It is all very well to say that the time which has been spent in, as it now appears, useless negotiation, has not been lost, and that the Government has been enabled to prepare the means of resisting the encroachments of Russia, and of wresting from her the territory she has seized. It is a poor defence to allege that fortune has, after all, favoured us, and that we are not in so bad a condition as we might have been. A blunder is not the less a blunder because its results are not so mischievous as they might be. ”