Lawes and Voelcker. As the latter observes, there are too many modifying influences of soil, climate, season, &c., to enable us to establish any invariable laws for the guidance of the husbandman ;' but the more we can trace effects to their causes and ascertain the mode in which nature operates, the nearer we are to fixed principles and a sure rule of practice.

It would seem then that the first great epoch of modern agricultural improvement began with Lord Townshend, who demonstrated the truth embodied in the adage,

'He who marls sand

May buy the land,'

showed the value of the turnip, and, as we presume, must have been a patron of the four-course system, which had its rise in Norfolk about the same time. The second epoch was that of Bakewell, whose principles of stock-breeding have ever since continued to raise, year by year, the average value of our meatproducing animals. The third epoch dates from the exertions of such men as the Duke of Bedford and Coke of Holkham, the latter of whom, combining usages which had been very partially acted upon, brought into favour drilled turnip husbandry, carried all the branches of farming as far as was permitted by the knowledge of his time, and did the inestimable service of innoculating hundreds of landlords and tenants with his own views. The fourth epoch, if we were to take each advance from its earliest dawn, would comprise the various dates of the opening of the first railroad, the importation of the first cargo of guano, the publication of Liebig's first edition of the 'Chemistry of Agriculture,' and the deep draining of the Bonesetter's field on Chat Moss; but in general terms it may be said to date from the first meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society at Oxford in 1839, when farmers began to be familiarized with men of science, and men of science learned not to despise agricultural experience. This last era is almost the birth of yesterday, and already, as compared with any former period, the results read more like a page from the Arabian Nights than like a chapter in the history of agricultural progress. Deep drainage, artificial manures, artificial food, improved implements, and railroad conveyance, have been the leading means by which the change has been wrought. Deep drainage has brought into play the unexhausted fertility of our strong clays; portable manures and purchased food have increased the crops on land of every degree, Mangold and swedes have been made to flourish on stiff soils, and cereals on sieve-like sands. Downs have been transformed from bare pastures to heavy root and rich grainbearing

bearing fields. The visitors to Salisbury Plain at the agricultural show of 1857 were surprised to find a large part of it converted into productive corn-land-a change which has been almost entirely effected within the last twenty years. The scientific mechanic has provided the tools and machinery for breaking up and pulverising the ground, for sowing the seed, for gathering the crops, for preparing it for market, for crushing or cutting the food for the stock, with an ease, a quickness, and a perfection unknown before. The railroad is the connecting medium which maintains the vast circulation, conveying the agencies of production to the farmer, and the produce of the farmer to the market. The steam-cultivator is, perhaps, about to be added to the triumphs of mechanism, and then will be realised the expression in the fine lines of Mr. Thackeray on the Great Exhibition of 1851-an expression which was premature if it was intended to be historic, but which we hope, and almost believe, will prove to be prophetic. 'Look yonder where the engines toil; These England's arms of conquest are, The trophies of her bloodless war;

The spirit of the old agriculture and the new are diametrically opposite that of the old agriculture was to be stationary, that of the new is to progress. When Young made his tour through the east of England in 1771, he remarks as a peculiarity that the turnip cabbage of a Mr. Reynolds, which had a special superiority, was gradually adopted by his neighbours'a circumstance,' he adds, that would not happen in many counties.' His works are, in fact, a narrative of individual enterprise and general stupidity. A Mr. Cooper who went into Dorsetshire from Norfolk could only get his turnips hoed by working himself year after year with his labourers, and refusing to be tired out by their deliberate awkwardness for the purpose of defeating his design. After he had continued the practice for twenty years, and all the surrounding farmers had witnessed the vast benefits to be derived from it, not a single one of them had begun to imitate him. Mr. Cooper, with two horses abreast, and no driver, ploughed an acre of land where his neighbours with four horses and a driver ploughed only three-quarters of an acre. Yet not a labourer would touch this unclean implement, as they seemed to think it, and no farmer, with such an example perpetually before his eyes, chose to save on each plough the wages

of

of a man, the keep of two horses, and the extra expenditure incurred by the diminished amount of work performed in the day. No longer ago than 1835, Sir Robert Peel presented a Farmers' Club at Tamworth with two iron ploughs of the best construction. On his next visit the old ploughs with the wooden mould-boards were again at work. 'Sir,' said a member of the club, we tried the iron, and we be all of one mind that they made the weeds grow.' On Young recommending the Dorsetshire agriculturists to fold their ewes in the winter they treated the idea with contempt; and on pressing them for their reasons, they replied, that the flock, in rushing out of the fold, would tread down the lambs,' though no such accident had ever been heard of, and that the lambs would not be able to find their dams in a large fold,' though certainly, says Young, 'a lamb in Dorsetshire has as much sense as a lamb elsewhere.' Whether the method had been beneficial or not, the grounds for rejecting it were equally absurd. Of two neighbouring counties one was sometimes a century behind the other. A lazy desire to creep with sluggish monotony along an established path, and a feeling of impatience at being pushed into a novel track, helped to maintain hereditary prejudices, and tenants invented fanciful excuses for not doing what was plainly advantageous to be done, because they preferred present sloth to future profit. They were like a man who had lain upon one side till he shrunk from the trouble of turning over to the other, though when the process was performed the new posture might be easier than the old. But once roused and put in motion, and the inherent reluctance to stir being overcome, the gain in interest as well as in pocket was felt to be great. He who has profited by one innovation is ready to try another, and his pride and his pleasure is to improve where his fathers gloried in resisting improvement. There are still large districts of England which have yet to be converted to a rational system of agriculture-landlords who are ignorant of the principles of management which attract or create intelligent tenants-and tenants who are ignorant of the methods by which the land is made to double its increase. But the wave of agricultural progress has acquired irresistible might, and they must mount it or it will sweep them away. The best thing which can be done for these laggards in the race is to persuade them to take in an agricultural newspaper, to get them to consult the commercial travellers who collect orders for the manufacturers of artificial manures, to talk them into replenishing their worn-out implements from the mart of the great makers, to prevail on them to visit the annual shows of the Royal Agricultural Society, to throw them, in short, in the way of seeing the products of advanced husbandry, and of hearing

the

the ideas of enlightened cultivators. By some or all of these means they may be put upon the high-road to improvement, and when they have gone an inch there is little fear, unless they are afflicted by a hopeless incapacity, that they will refuse to go the ell. He who lives within the diameter of a little circle has ideas as narrow as his horizon, but the influence of numbers and skill together is irresistible, and no impersonation of ignorance or bigotry has probably ever visited a single great agricultural exhibition without returning a wiser and a better farmer.

ART. V.-1. The Life of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, with Translations of many of his Poems and Letters. By John S. Harford, Esq., D.C.L., F.R.S. In 2 vols. London, 1857.

2. Illustrations, Architectural and Pictorial, of the Genius of Michael Angelo Buonarroti. With Descriptions of the Plates by the Commendatore Canina, C. R. Cockerell, Esq., R. A., and John S. Harford, Esq., F.R.S.

THE

HE two volumes upon Michael Angelo, by a gentleman of Mr. Harford's station, are no slight testimony to the enlightened attention now devoted to the subject of art by the class most at liberty to choose their own studies and recreations. Such free-will offerings are the more valuable from the circumstance that they are usually presented with a liberality as regards time, trouble, and money which the more professional contributor can seldom afford, and which this work offers to us in more than common abundance. Mr. Harford's name was previously known to the public in honourable connexion with that of the illustrious object of his labours for services rendered in the same liberal spirit to artists as well as to art. In 1854 he published, at considerable expense, a plate of the Sistine ceiling, no less remarkable for its large size than for the effect of colour produced by an elaborate application of the chromo-lithographic process. Considering the double difficulty of giving any adequate idea of a work, itself seen under so many disadvantages, Mr. Harford's plate may be pronounced the most successful, as a general representation of the ceiling, yet produced. The profits of the sale are devoted to the benefit of the Artists' General Benevolent Institution. This fine lithograph is now incorporated with a folio of engravings accompanying the Life, in which no pains have been spared to assist the public to comprehend Michael Angelo as architect as well as painter, and which, having the advantage of a careful and enthusiastic essay from the pen of Mr. Cockerell, is valuable with or without the work it illustrates.

But

But it is not in generosity of labour or liberality of illustration alone that Mr. Harford shows the independent amateur; the mode in which he has conceived his subject is strictly true to that character also. He may be said to lead the reader up to Michael Angelo by every avenue, except that which most appertains to connoisseurship. We approach the great Florentine by little help of criticism, and by few standards of comparison, either with himself or others, but rather through the literature, philosophy, and salient forms of thought of his day; the author touches on none of the disputed points in his history; he gives us no list of the works of this unprecedented pluralist in art; but, on the principle that a man is best known by his associates, he introduces him surrounded by those living characters whom he believes to have influenced his mind as well as his destiny. Thus the chief personages of that mysterious Florence of the 15th century are successively evoked before us-Lorenzo de' Medici, the magnificent Egotist, the devotee chiefly of a spurious Platonism, the patriot only in art and learning-Politian, the Medicean laureate, and tutor to the future Leo X.-Ficinio, the high-priest of the philosophic Academy-Pico de Mirandola, the lesser Italian Crichton-Matteo Franco-Bartolommeo Scala -Luigi Pulci—with minor literati, sparkling, profligate, and classic and, finally, the melancholy figure of the puritanic martyr Savonarola, whose stern trumpet-call of Christian protest is heard in harsh opposition to the lulling Pagan tones, which, floating on the surface of Italian society, show the deep moral corruption beneath.

Nor are the results of Mr. Harford's labours dependent for interest on the nature of his subjects only. No matter what the theme-and our short summary comprehends the very antipodes of the dull and interesting in systems and men-from the dreariest dreams of modern Platonism equally as from the stirring echoes of the Reformation yon side the Alps (his favourite and leading topic), this hard-working volunteer extracts a narrative so lucid and elegant as to afford little conception of the obscurity, wordiness, and pedantry through which he himself has forced his way.

In this desire to reflect light on the life he has undertaken, from every form of intellectual depth or sophistical surface at all coincident with it, Mr. Harford expresses not only his own feelings, but that of an important and highly-cultivated class. To such thinkers great part of the interest inspired by art consists in its supposed connexion with the mind of its period; and though not prepared to agree unreservedly with this belief, it may be accepted as one of those cases in which an opinion may bear good fruit without being strictly founded on truth. Whatever reason, indeed, leads the educated and the excellent to take

an