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tions. A testator should be given full liberty to bequeath his property absolutely to whomsoever he chooses, no provisoes as to marriage or other limiting clauses to be considered good in law. A limit should, however, be placed on the power of any individual to exclude his wife or any of his children from a share of his property, and taking the Scotch law regarding personalty as a basis, one-half should be set aside as the ' inalienable portion' of the younger children and widow or widower, the portion of the latter to be permitted to be controlled by whatsoever limitation the testator chooses to insert in his testament.6

Such, in a few words, are the lines which might be adopted for creating an Act to regulate the land laws of England; a companion Act dealing with the powers of testamentary disposition is absolutely necessary to give any completeness to a scheme for obviating the evils which now exist. The hitherto sacred character of testamentary provisions has worked incalculable evil, both directly and indirectly, to the land; yet it would be manifestly unjust to curtail the powers of landowners without at the same time dealing with the right of bequeathal generally to every other species of property.

Thus we should insure the just and fair authority of the father over the children, and at the same time control the father from acts of injustice and overbearing conduct towards those who are more or less necessarily dependant on him for their future, and who were brought into the world by his desire.

That the passing of such laws as this would operate an immense change in the disposition of landed property in the period of one generation cannot be denied, yet the evil consequences which have resulted from the long continuance of old laws are not to be eradicated by less heroic means, neither would such measures as are here sketched out perpetrate acts of injustice or expropriation on present holders of property. The State has a right to define the powers of

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• Mr. Brodrick, in his able work on the English land, when discussing the evils of limited ownership, says, p. 347, that the abolition of life estates in land is, therefore, perfectly consistent with the maintenance or toleration of life interests in personalty, if public opinion is not yet ripe for a radical alteration in the form of ordinary marriage settlements. It is also perfectly consistent with the practice of vesting a family property whole and undivided in the eldest son, and charging it for the benefit of a widow and younger children. It would even be consistent with the practice of directing a property to be sold and settling the proceeds as personalty, yet allowing the sale to be postponed so long as the parties interested should be willing to accept interest out of the undivided property in lieu of capital sums out of the proceeds.'-Certain advantages might be gained in such a family arrangement as is here described, as it would enable the influence of the whole family to exert itself much as it does under the French conseil de famille which is recognised as a social institution in the Code. An insuperable objection, however, exists to the plan Mr. Brodrick recommends of allowing a testator the full powers of bequeathal over his property of all sorts; and as a confirmation of this we need only refer to the case of Wilson v. Birchall, as reported in the papers of February 16, 1881, by which it will be seen that a testator left the whole of his wife's fortune of 40,000%., which she inherited from her father, to his mistress and his two illegitimate children.

testamentary disposition which should be allowed to the individual, and it cannot be said that if a fair time be given for the working out of such measures, the value of landed property would be diminished. Sales would undoubtedly become more frequent, especially of small portions of land; owners would be tempted to break up out-lying estates and put them up to sale in small lots,' after having registered the title and cleared the charges thereon. Plenty of buyers would turn up immediately the various difficulties of title and expenses of transfer were got rid of, the various building and land societies in the country are even now, under the present involved state of our land laws, working in this direction, and we can readily conceive the impetus which would be given for further developing these useful projects.

Labourers would soon become the owners of gardens and cottages. Farmers would often purchase their farms outright. A stimulus to save would be created throughout the whole nation, when everyone could look forward to purchase a house and a small freehold from out of their savings.

Can anyone (even the most outrageous Conservative) deny that the re-establishment of a yeoman class of labourers or farmers would be other than an inestimable boon to this country, and would eventually raise up a class who, instead of being antagonistic to the rights of property, will be among its staunchest defenders. Surely we have in the state of political thought on the Continent enough to warn us that we require in this country to throw up a popular rampart against the growing fallacies of Communism. Is Nihilism, Socialism, and Internationalism to be the creed of the labouring classes on the Continent only, and are we to be for ever free from this fatal political disease? If so, these objects must be secured, and we cannot too early set to work to inaugurate just laws encouraging the greater division of property in land, and thus arm the whole nation against these subversive hordes from the larger towns and restless centres of industry. Can it be supposed otherwise that in the day of trouble arguments and lengthy speeches on political economy will be of any avail. The Tory party, who are rampant to-day at the very thought of the curtailment of the right of the landowners in Ireland, seem not to be able to see the consequences which would result were they successful in their opposition. It is impossible, however, in Ireland, as also it is in England, for one class for ever to monopolise every rational source of happiness in a country, and to place up notice boards to warn off trespassers along every avenue of enterprise, except the one long high road of daily drudgery and labour, or the demoralising bypath of drunkenness, poverty, and crime.

BLANDFORD.

JULES JACQUEMART.

THERE died, last September, at his mother's house in the great high road between the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois, a unique artist whose death was for the most part unobserved by the frequenters of picture galleries. He had contributed but little to picture galleries. There had not been given to Jules Jacquemart the pleasure of a very wide notoriety, but in many ways he was happy-in many fortunate. He was fortunate, to begin with, in his birth; for though he was born in the bourgeoisie, it was in the cultivated bourgeoisie, and it was in the bourgeoisie of France. His father, Albert Jacquemart, the known historian of pottery and porcelain, and of ancient and fine furniture, was of course a diligent amateur of beautiful things, so that Jules Jacquemart was reared in a house where little was ugly, and much was exceedingly precious; a house organised, albeit unconsciously, on William Morris's admirable plan, 'Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.' Thus his own natural sensitiveness, which he had inherited, was highly cultivated from the first. From the first he breathed the air of Art. He was happy in the fact that adequate fortune gave him the liberty, in health, of choosing his work, and in sickness, of taking his rest. With comparatively rare exceptions, he did precisely the things which he was fitted to do, and did them perfectly, and being ill when he had done them, he betook himself to the exquisite South, where colour is, and light-the things we long for the most when we are most tired in cities-and so there came to him towards the end a surprise of pleasure in so beautiful a world. He was happy in being surrounded all his life long by passionate affection in the narrow circle of his home. His mother survives him -the experience of bereavement being hers, when it would naturally have been his. For himself, he was happier than she, for he had never suffered any quite irreparable loss. And in one other way he was probably happy-in that he died in middle age, his work being entirely done. The years of deterioration and of decay, in which first the artist does but dully reproduce the spontaneous work of his youth, and then is sterile altogether the years in which he is no longer the fashion at all, but only the landmark or the finger-post of

a fashion that is past-the years when a name once familiar is uttered at rare intervals and in tones of apology as the name of one whose performance has never quite equalled the promise he had aforetime. given these years never came to Jules Jacquemart. He was spared these years.

But few people care, or are likely to care very much, for the things which chiefly interested him, and which he reproduced in his art; and even the care for these things, where it does exist, does unfortunately by no means imply the power to appreciate the art by which they are retained and diffused. Still-life,' using the awkward expression in its broadest sense-the pourtrayal of objects, natural or artificial, for the objects' sake, and not as background or accessory-has never been rated very highly or very widely loved. Here and there a professed connoisseur has had pleasure from some piece of exquisite workmanship; a rich man has looked with idly caressing eye upon the skilful record of his gold plate or the grapes of his forcing-house. There has been praise for the adroit Dutchmen, and for Lance, and Blaise Desgoffe. But the public generally-save perhaps in the case of William Hunt, his birds' nests and primroseshas been indifferent to these things, and often the public has been right in its indifference, for often these things are done in a poor spirit, a spirit of servile imitation, or servile flattery, with which Art has nothing to do. But there are exceptions, and there is a better way of looking at these things. William Hunt was often one of these exceptions; Chardin was always-save in a rare instance or so of dull pomposity of rendering; Jules Jacquemart, take him for all in all, was of these exceptions the most brilliant and the most peculiar. He, in his best art of etching, and his fellows and forerunners in the art of painting, have done something to endow the beholders of their work with a new sense, with the capacity for new experiences of enjoyment--they have pourtrayed not so much matter as the very soul of matter. They have put matter in its finest light: it has got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches, his pears, his big coarse bottles, his rough copper saucepans, his silk-lined caskets. Jacquemart did it-we shall see in more of detail presently-very specially with the finer work of artistic men in household matter and ornament; with his blue and white porcelain, with his polished steel of chased armour and sword-blade, with his Renaissance mirrors, with his precious vessels of crystal and jade and jasper. But when he was most fully himself, his work most characteristic and individual, he shut himself off from popularity. Even untrained observers could accept the agile engraver as an interpreter of other men's picturesof Meissonier's inventions, or Van der Meer's, or Greuze's-but they could not accept him as the interpreter at first hand of the treasures which were so peculiarly his own that he may almost be said to have discovered them and their beauty. They were not alive to the

wonders that have been done in the world by the hands of artistic men. How could they be alive to the wonders of this their reproduction-their translation, rather, and a very free and personal oneinto the subtle lines, the graduated darks, the soft or sparkling lights, of the artist in etching?

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On September 7, 1837, Jacquemart was born, in Paris, and the profession of art, in one or other of its branches, came naturally to a man of his race. A short period of practice in draughtmanship, and only a small experience of the particular business of etching, sufficed to make him a master. As time proceeded, he of course developed; he found new methods-ways not previously known to him. But little of what is obviously tentative and immature is to be noticed even in his earliest work. He springs into his art an artist fully armed, like Rembrandt with the wonderful portrait of his mother 'lightly etched.' In 1860, when he is but twenty-three, he is at work upon the illustrations to his father's Histoire de la Porcelaine, and though in that publication the absolute realisation of wonderful matter is not perhaps so noteworthy as in the Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne, there is evident already the hand of the delicate artist and the eye that can appreciate and render almost unconsidered beauties. Exquisite matter and the forms that art has given to common things have found their new interpreter. The Histoire de la Porcelaine contains twenty-six plates, most of which are devoted to Oriental china, of which the elder Jacquemart possessed a magnificent collection at a time when the popular rage for blue and white' was still unpronounced. Many of Albert Jacquemart's pieces figure in the book; they were pieces the son had lived with and which he knew familiarly. Their charm, their delicacy, he perfectly represented, and of each individual piece he appreciated the characteristics, passing too, without sense of difficulty, from the bizarre ornamentation of the East to the ordered forms and satisfying symmetry which the high taste of the Renaissance gave to its products. Thus, in the Histoire de la Porcelaine-amongst the quaintly naturalistic decorations from China (pieces whose beauties Mr. Lang might chaffingly sing about as made to perfection in the reign of the Emperor Hwang'), and amongst the ornaments of Sèvres, with their pretty boudoir graces and airs of light luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and the sleek young abbé her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered with just as thorough an appreciation, a Brocca Italienne, the Brocca of the Medicis, of the sixteenth century, slight and tall, where the lightest of Renaissance forms, the thin and reed-like lines of the arabesque-no mass or splash of colour-is patterned with measured exactitude, with rhythmic completeness, over the smoothish surface. It is wonderful how little work there is in the etching and how much is suggested. The actual touches are almost as few as those which Jacquemart

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