Before leaving this part of our subject we may call attention to the rather singular, and perhaps unique, fact that we have in our penny a symbol representing double what it actually is worth, constituting a curious exception to the general rule that the intrinsic value of a symbol is as nothing to what it represents. Many of us remember that our pennies used to be much larger than they are to-day; they are now worth about a halfpenny in metal, and as representing the twelfth part of a shilling they are deceptive and seriously lacking in substance. Whether the Government make any profit on this apparently nefarious transaction, whether they actually draw from us a shillingsworth of silver for the sixpennyworth of copper they issue to us, is a question which we must leave our currency doctors to decide. We are told that we must look on our small bronze change only as tokens, and not trouble our heads about their value, which, as the matter is of small importance to each of us as an individual, we have no objection to do, casually remembering that the issue of tokens has often been prohibited, among others by Charles the First who granted to the Duchess of Richmond and others the exclusive right to coin farthing tokens for seventeen years. The farthings issued by these patentees were, we are told in history, the subject of much discontent, as they were greatly below the intrinsic value of the metal. If we are not discontented with our diminutive pennies now, it is not because we consider them, with Mr. Mantalini, beneath our notice, but simply for the reason that life is too short to work out and clearly understand these difficult questions of political economy, our existence being, as has often been remarked, only a series of compromises all round. We accept this doubtful coin because it is stamped with a very significant emblem or

symbol, that of Britannia to wit. As a private enterprise under a less august ægis it would not be tolerated for a moment.

Such are some of the minor difficulties connected with our trust in symbols, a trust which governs our life to a far greater extent than we are perhaps aware of. Carlyle made us observe how the blue coat of the policeman keeps order and the red robe of the judge inspires awe. Without knowing it we all in a greater or lesser degree imitate the councillors of that first Governor of New York who, happening to be prevented from attending a council meeting, and fearing they might in his absence forget the awe with which he inspired them, caused his hat and stick to be placed on the green cloth as a significant reminder. In the midst of a rebellious speech the eye of a recalcitrant councillor would fall on these emblems or symbols of authority and, hesitating, he would mutter some apology and close by expressing his cordial approval of the Governor's remarks if his Excellency had been present to make them. In the same way the tyrant Gessler put his hat on a post, and required every loyal Swiss to do obeisance before the symbol, until William Tell sent an arrow through the apple and another through the tyrant himself.

The trifling detail that Tell never existed is of small importance for our argument. Gessler undoubtedly did exist, and so of course did his hat. As a symbolical story of proud resistance to injustice and oppression, every country's history has a William Tell. We have one in William of Cloudesly, in one of the old ballads, who shot an apple off his son's head and so pleased the queen (name unknown), that she granted him the singular pension of thirteen pence a day. The extra penny may have been to make up weight,-who knows?

The head-covering has at all times played a strangely symbolic part in our lives. It is difficult to say when, where, and how the custom of removing it as a sign of respect first originated; it is not, as we are now too much inclined to think, an instinctive and natural action or impulse. It is true a Japanese coolie or ricksha-runner will remove his straw hat before he begins to vituperate a competitor, but in other Oriental countries the custom does not prevail. Jews wear their hats in their synagogues, and Penn refused to take off his hat even in the presence of King Charles, who removed his own with the witty remark that one of the two must really do it, since only one hat can be worn when the king is present. That the action of uncovering is not essentially reverential in itself is proved by the fact that at the most solemn part of a trial the judge in England covers his head. As we know, an occult meaning attaches to the hat in the House of Commons. It is hard to understand why members must, for instance, speak covered after a division has been called; but with the fear of the Clock-Tower before our eyes we do not care to dwell overmuch on the symbolism which Parliament in its wisdom has decreed.

Every one is aware of the dreadfully significant part the executioner's axe plays in a trial for high treason. The sharp symbol of death is carried before the prisoner with its blunt side turned towards him so long as he has not been sentenced, and just before sentence is pronounced the sharp edge is turned his way. Evelyn, who was present at the trial of Lord Stafford in 1680, tells us that the axe was turned edgeways to the unfortunate nobleman so soon as it was ascertained that the voting of the Peers went against him,-an effective but ghastly piece of stage-management which must have had a sickening

fascination for the unhappy, and probably innocent, man. In those days, now happily gone by, no one seems to have reflected on the unnecessary cruelty of harrowing the feelings of men about to die by such shocking judicial byplay.

Not every prisoner treated this purely symbolic but otherwise superfluous and unpleasant ceremony as contemptuously as did Lord Balmerino. When the three coaches conveyed the Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino, and Cromartie from the Tower to be sentenced at Westminster on the 28th of July, 1746, a difficulty arose. It was not laid down by prescription or use in which coach, if there were more than one, the fatal axe had to be carried. "Oh, put the thing in here," cried brave old Balmerino; "I don't care."

Yet notwithstanding his contempt for this horrid symbol, the undaunted old man cheerfully suffered death for his sincere attachment to another symbol, the White Cockade. The Lord Kilmarnock in the next coach was dreadfully frightened, as he showed himself to be, by his thorough realization of what the awful axe would mean to him. He enquired minutely into all the details of an execution, wanted the Governor of the Tower to tell him whether his head would roll or rebound, and when on the scaffold he saw the executioner dressed in white, with a white apron, he whispered to his chaplain, "Home, how horrible!" But he cared not a brass farthing, as he said himself, for the symbolic white ribbon of the Stuarts; being ruined and starving, he would, he said, have fought for Mahomet if that religious Pretender had set up his standard on the braes of Mar.

As a set off against these mournful illustrations we may call to mind the laughable collection of symbols made by Sir Walter Scott. When by mischance the informer Murray of Brough

ton drank a cup of tea in his father's house, the lawyer opened the window and tossed the contaminated cup into the street; but Sir Walter secured and cherished the symbolic saucer. Later on, when the Prince Regent visited Scotland, the Wizard of the North begged to be allowed to keep the wineglass used by his Royal Highness; but putting it in his pocket he unfortunately sat down on it, and could only add the pieces to the saucer. These broken remnants of crockery must have been abstractly symbolic to him of treachery and loyalty, for he could have had little respect for the personal characters of either Mr. Murray or Prince George.

The worst case of wilful abuse of symbols must be looked for in the realm of what is known as Symbolic Art. According to some this is the highest possible form of art because it does not please, but only edifies and instructs. Without quarrelling with this singular definition of the purpose of art, it is possible to express a regret that, like the productions of the Realistic school, the masterpieces of Allegorical art throw such a heavy burden on the imagination. We often gaze in blank bewilderment at symbolic pictures which on the face of them neither tell their story nor teach their lesson in any intelligible language. The catalogue usually comes to our aid and explains the recondite meaning in a neat or poetical paragraph; but it would be more satisfactory, where the mystery has to be explained at all, if the painter would do it himself in a corner of the canvas. Serious objections to this sensible plan are not obvious, and there are precedents for it. Holbein and his contemporaries frequently painted the name and the age of the sitter on the backgrounds of their portraits,-a practice superfluous in the case of Holbein but not necessarily so for some other portraits, and

highly desirable for all allegorical paintings. Such a straightforward course would prevent awkward mistakes which do undoubtedly occur now and then, and are hard to explain away afterwards. When we have taken a pictorial lesson to heart and hear later on that it teaches something else, we are as much annoyed as was Artemus Ward when he visited the churchyard of Stratford-on-Avon and was told that he had been weeping at the wrong grave. The following is a case in point.

One of our London art-galleries exhibited some years ago a mysteriouslooking picture of which it was felt the average visitor to the exhibition would be able to make nothing, and the catalogue therefore told us it represented Samuel and the Witch of Endor. Such a printed declaration is usually accepted as final by the majority of those who pay their shilling at the door; but this time it happened not to be true, though the public would have been none the wiser if another description had been given, the meaning of the picture remaining equally obscure after consulting the catalogue. In the exact centre of the canvas the head of a handsome man of sad and austere aspect (the ostensible Samuel) was shown surrounded by rays of light extending to the frame, and close to this face, in the very incandescence of the rays of light, appeared the somewhat shadowy face of a woman. That is actually all there was of Samuel and of the witch; all the rest was flame and frame. Looking from the picture to the catalogue, and back again, left the matter very much where it was; the call on our imagination was very severe and the moral or intellectual lesson, which is the only conceivable reason of symbolic art, was as good as wasted. We took it as a matter of course that the painter, a distinguished artist of some repute in his country,

could just as easily have painted the said Samuel complete, as a prophet or as a Bedouin, and represented the witch also complete in all the repulsiveness of Oriental squalor and old age. As he had not done so, but deliberately chose the subject, limiting himself to two handsome heads shining together like a double star, it is plain that we were in the presence of a problem, of a lesson which pictorially could only be put before us in this way, otherwise there is no sense, no rhyme or reason in symbolic painting. With the solution obligingly put in our hands by the catalogue we did not like to acknowledge ourselves beaten, and tried hard to work out the problem to our satisfaction. It rather shocked our preconceived notions when we discovered the celebrated witch to have been an exceedingly pretty woman, but this part of the symbol, though historically it may be incorrect, had no difficulties for the Philistine of our party, who declared the symbol to be as plain as a pikestaff. "Samuel," he said, "tries to read the future in the eyes of a pretty woman; many of us have tried to do the same, and we must take warning."

Should we? Was it a warning or an example? The catalogue was silent, and for once the painter himself could not have assisted us, because, as a disconcerting matter of fact, a few years earlier in its history this picture was not Samuel at all. Incredible as it may appear to believers in mystic art, an illustrated art-journal, dated a few years before, revealed when we came home the singular and uncomfortable fact that once upon a time this same picture represented the Temptation of St. Anthony, and was then described as an illustration of Flaubert's novel of that name; the engraving of the picture removes all doubt on the subject and is a wonderful revelation and lesson in emblematical art. The artist's original intention must be left

out of the question; he may not have known anything of this double-barrelled explanation. It cannot be both Samuel and St. Anthony at one and the same time; the subjects, needless to say, are entirely different and as far as the poles asunder; the human motives or passions cannot in any way be made to fit into an identical symbolic treatment.

This extreme case may be dismissed as one not likely, with a little care, to happen again; but it proves how very little is the value of allegorical painting, for what can be the practical use of a symbol which can be so absurdly misunderstood? The suspicion cannot be altogether ignored that pictorial symbols are sometimes after-thoughts. Many a study of the head of a model indifferently moral has perhaps done duty for Purity, or the happy thought of a nimbus may have turned it into a Saint. The introduction of some musical instrument has before now, such is the power of a symbol, made a St. Cecilia of a woman who did not know the treble from the bass.

After making due allowance for these and similar mistakes and abuses, we have to admit that the importance and value of symbols cannot easily be overestimated. We cannot grasp the widespread complications of many questions of public interest, unless we form them into one generally understood sign or formula. The various duties of citizenship and the benefits we derive from a well-ordered State and government, together with our pride in the country in which we happen to be born, are all included and implied in the national flag. The essence of nearly every religion has been, so to speak, concentrated and symbolized in a certain sign or emblem (In hoc signo vinces), which has been held sacred, and for which men have suffered martyrdom who would have hopelessly lost themselves in the intricacies of the

dogmas it represents.

Even the Mahometans, to whom images are forbidden, have the Crescent under which they so long fought against the Cross. The crown and sceptre, as symbols of Royalty, are the hat and stick of the old Dutch Governor, sanctified by jewels and tradition, and act in precisely the same way by keeping us in order. The sceptre was originally only a stick and was not always as small as it is now; that of the earliest Frankish kings was a rod of gold as tall as the king himself.

The British Lion is an emblem too well known to require explanation; it has a firmer hold on the imagination than the Cock of France or the double Eagle of Austria. The endeavor to represent a nationality by a personal emblem has never been successful; with the greatest goodwill one has to admit that John Bull and Brother Jonathan Macmillan's Magazine.

are very much lacking in dignity. But men have fought and died for the Lilies of the Bourbons as well as for the Eagle of the Napoleons; they glory in the Stars and Stripes and mourn for the Harp that once in Tara's halls, -in short there are thousands of signs or emblems in which men have seen reflected their hopes, their pride, or their ambition; and we may well say that he is but a poor specimen of manhood who has no symbol which he cherishes above all things, some creation of the mind in which he has faith even though a restricted vocabulary does not allow him to explain it. Many a man who does not know that his own name is only a symbol without which he could not be distinguished from the rest of mankind, dimly understands that it is his pride and duty to carry it through life with honor and unstained.

Marcus Reed.

GOVERNMENT

"Our Ministerial system may almost be said to have been born at the dinner table. The first regular private meetings of the Cabinet were Harley's famous Saturday dinners, at which the inner group of Queen Anne's Council could get together and discuss affairs, without the presence either of the Queen or of unconvinced colleagues." This remark, which occurs in Mr. Sidney Low's admirable volume (The Governance of England, by Sidney Low. 7s. 6d. Fisher Unwin), would serve as a text for a good part of what he says on our political system. For, as he shows, the successive vicissitudes of politics and parties have not substantially affected the oligarchical character of our Government. Reform Bills have not pushed wealth and rank from their old predominance, though wealth and rank have, perhaps, changed places

and government has become more plutocratic than aristocratic. "The English working man, in the five-andthirty years after the Act of 1867, followed in the footsteps of his predecessor in political predominance, the small shopkeeper of the five-and-thirty years that succeeded the Act of 1832. He remained faithful to the tradition which has prevailed through all English history, that the conduct of public affairs should properly be entrusted to those who enjoy the advantages of birth, breeding, and affluence." The country is still governed by the men and women who have the right and the means to give each other dinner parties.

Mr. Low makes some interesting reflections on the consequences of giving this great preponderant power to the rich and aristocratic classes. He