Emperor. The portrait, executed afterwards, is well-known and admired. Other commissions of a like nature crowded upon the artist. He refused some of them; but he could not refuse all. Works that are comparatively slight, and are sure to be well paid for, are generally but too readily undertaken-though they retard the greater efforts. And thus at last art suffers by the artist's popularity. A journey to Rome-the city after which Flandrin "had sighed for twenty years"--had long been in prospect; and it was hoped he would have been able to carry it into effect in the autumn of 1862. For his own part he felt that he had waited too long, and that if he could have given himself this advantage before, some strength would have been added to his work at Saint Germain des Prés. But even in the autumn of 1862 the hope was not to be realized. Business of a half-official nature kept him at home; for he was now a man of influence, and had been placed upon a very important committee, appointed at the instance of Count Walewski, to give general advice to the Government on artistic affairs. Instead of going to Rome, Flandrin and his wife contented themselves with a rapid tour, during which they saw the chief churches and pictures of Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Cologne. In the Church of S. Bavon-the cathedral of Ghent-they were particularly struck with Jean Van Eyck's "Triumph of the Lamb." "The disposition of the subject, the light, the colour, form an ensemble full of poetry; and the effect of all this is augmented when one goes further, and sces the moral sense of all these figures. I don't know if I ever met with such an assemblage of good points. Three times during the day we came back to look at this picture." Of Rubens he expressed a somewhat qualified admiration; but his remarks will, I hope, commend themselves to many minds. "He is magnificent and complete, and while you look at him you desire nothing else but turn to early art, and you forget the splendours of talent; for early art goes to the heart straight, and leaves impressions that must endure." Flandrin's health, which had been slowly giving way during now several years, failed more visibly during 1863; and it was finally decided that towards the end of autumn he should start for Italy. He was accompanied by his wife and their two children; and the party arrived in Rome in the first days of November. At the earliest possible opportunity he paid a visit to the Academy, in which five of his happiest years had been spent. He says in a letter to his brother "With care, so that we should not be recognised too soon, we approached the villa. There it stood: the house in which you and I were so happy. Hidden under green oaks, we looked up at the front of it. I half-reproached myself for having seen it again without you. That we should see it together is not now possible; and one must thank God for the regret that proves how much we are attached each to the other." Hippolyte Flandrin was well pleased to wander at leisure through the picture galleries, and renew his familiar acquaintance of old with the masterpieces of Italian Art. The present pleasure was mixed with the pleasure of memory. But most men's memories are bitter sweets. Noticing some frescoes whose preservation was endangered, he could not think with coolness of the eventual destruction of such wonders the productions of a privileged man and a privileged time. In the expression of his regret we catch a note of an almost personal sorrow "That time is passed for ever; nothing can bring it back; for men's tastes and ideas are daily more at variance with it, and these make the breach wider than any number of years. In the midst of general doubt-such as that of our day-a man of simple faith seems merely stupid; but yet what can one do without that faith?" He complained that the desired change did not bring its desired effect; his strength did not come back again; incapacity for work irritated and grieved him. He looked forward to the spring, and hoped it would give him new activity; but before it came in all its fulness he was beyond its restoring power. With an enfeebled constitution, he was naturally an easy victim of any violent disease. An attack of small-pox, which begun in the middle of March, ended fatally on the 21st of the same month; and in the heart of the city whose very stones he loved, Hippolyte Flandrin drew his last breath. They carried the corpse to Paris, and laid it down, with all due solemnity, in the Church of Saint Germain des Prés. Friends and admirers gathered round the coffin, and tender words were spoken, and words of no scanty praise; but it was felt that praise was not needed there. His monument was upon the church's walls: it had been his life's best work. What Flandrin was as a man-as husband, father, brother-concerned those only who knew from experience, and they did not want to be told. What he was as a painter-the pictures there might show it. T. FREDERICK WEDMORE. 1. [Some Words for God; being*] Sermons preached before the Universit 2. Life in the World: being a Selection from Sermons preached at St Luke's, COMPLAINT is sometimes made, as by a writer (J. B. M.) in the January number of this Journal, that sermons are uttered by excellent friends of ours, capital fellows, and so on, but men whom we should never suspect of such solemnities as they are now giving forth; to whom we therefore listen with blank astonishment, and a sense of the powerlessness of their exhortation as alien from their known character. But this view ought to be taken in all its bearings. Are we quite sure, which of the two is the real man,-the first-rate oar and genial joker, or the solemn adviser in the pulpit? Or are we sure, before we pronounce our verdict on the unreality of the exhortation, that both may not represent the real man in different phases of his character? At all events, have we any right to say that that aspect of him is unreal, which he would in an instant present in the presence of any awful reality? Why should we hold that the desipientia in loco is the man's true self, and deny that character to his more solemn words and acts? Is it not notorious that with many of our friends and acquaintances, a few stealthy These words are omitted from the title of the second edition. words, rarely uttered, betray the depths of thought which make up the man, and the conventional surface is but artificial? Is not the ground of that impregnable confidence which we have in our best friends put thus, that we know there is in them such an unfathomed depth of pure principle, generous feeling, solemn thought, within? And why should we preachers be judged more hardly than others? Suppose I never speak elsewhere the words, or anything like the words, which I utter in the pulpit : is it not precisely for this reason,— that in the pulpit alone, or when writing for the pulpit, do I feel liberty in disclosing my real inmost convictions on the most solemn subjects? In the pulpit alone: but this is not exclusively true. My friend and I perhaps have walked and talked together for years -he, a preacher, I, a preacher. But it may be we have never once during these years spoken to one another at all as we speak to our people. What is the inference? That we are hypocrites when we speak to our people? Let us see. What examples shall we take of occasions in life analogous to the circumstances under which we address our people? Suppose either of us meets with a great sorrow, and is visited by the other; suppose either of us laid on a death-bed, and converse to take place with the other. Then we have circumstances somewhat corresponding. What kind of words spring from the hearts of friends on such occasions? Does any one suspect them of unreality? Why then should such suspicion light on our sayings when we stand face to face with men's souls, and speak to them as in His presence who knows the thoughts of the heart? It happened to the writer of this article to hear Mr. Liddon preach at the evening services in Westminster Abbey on Sunday, June 2, 1861. On leaving the church I found myself side by side with the late Mr. Hampden Gurney. I expressed my surprise, knowing that he never left his church to hear any sermons elsewhere. His answer was, "I was told that I should hear the first preacher in England: and I have not been disappointed." The sermon indeed had fully borne out even this high praise. Opening the volume under the power of this recollection, I was nevertheless prepared to find the usual great difference between the living voice and the printed page. And there can be no doubt that in this case it is found. Mr. Liddon's printed sermons are very remarkable; but much has been lost from them. As they stand, they hardly bear out Mr. Gurney's description of their author. Perhaps it is not and cannot be in University sermons, that we are to look for the highest order of eloquence. Perhaps in that distinguished audience the preacher stands so completely on a level with his hearers, midway among them, nay, behind many of them in attainment and power, that there cannot be that speaking down from a height, which seems essential to the great orator-that impassioned cry of the watchman, seeing more than they see to whom he cries. Those of us who have had to compose University sermons will bear witness how, as we sit and write, we become chastened in style and modest in assertion; what almost undue proportion is assumed by the danger of offending against taste; how the scorn of the critic haunts our imagination, and perhaps our better and stronger self is held back through fear. Something of this kind may have affected Mr. Liddon in the composition of these sermons; for we do not often recognise in them that bounding onward of fearless eloquence, which kept us, cager on its track, in the crowded Abbey. Still, we are not sure that these are not better printed sermons than that one would have proved to be. And if so, then the fault is with printed sermons as compared with spoken ones, not so much with Mr. Liddon, in one of his two capacities. As the highest order of eloquence can hardly be where a preacher is addressing his equals, so neither, it would appear, can it be committed in all its living power to the press. The experiment has been again and again tried, of reporting faithfully a speech known to have been of the first order, and failure has been almost invariably the result. The failure has of course been more signal, in proportion as the success was owing to effects which cannot be represented on paper; and, per contra, the written speech has more nearly approached the fame of the spoken one, where excellence depended on beauty of style, a choice of words, or cogency of logical argument. But we must proceed to the review of this volume of Mr. Liddon's sermons, not as compared with what we heard, but as it is in itself. The first sermon is entitled "God and the Soul." It is a masterly plea for personal religion, dependent on that state of the spirit which may be described by the utterance of the words "My God." He discusses the hindrances to this state; and having described the first as moral, consisting in unrepented sin, he proceeds : "The other cause is intellectual. I may be pardoned for describing it as the subjective spirit, which is so characteristic and predominant an influence in the thought of our day. In plain English, this spirit is an intellectual selfishness which makes man, and not God, the monarch and centre of the world of thought. Man is again to be, as of old with the Greek Sophist, the measure of all things. God is as but a point on the extreme circumference of His creature's thought. Nay more, in its more developed form this spirit makes God Himself a pure creation of the thought of His creature; and, by doing so, it at length denies His real existence. But even where it stops very far short of this fatal and culminating wrong, it accustoms men to see in religious truth the colouring or the productions of the human mind so exclusively, as to eat out the very heart of the religious life. For we men can no more worship that which we deem to be the creations of our own or |