What would be the effect of the new system, if applied to romantic fiction?  But the question is unnecessary; for the new system ignores romance, which is the truth of nature not of fact.  A pre-Raphaelite story, taken from real life, might be romantic in its incidents and striking in its catastrophe; but it would want coherence in the design, and therefore produce no sustained emotion; and its characters being drawn, without selection, from vulgar prototypes, would excite more disgust than interest.  The drama?—­but there the new theory of art becomes too ridiculous:  a tragedy on such a plan would be received with alternate yawns of ennui and shouts of laughter.  All these are pertinent questions; for fine art, in literature, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, forms a homogeneous circle under one law of taste.

It may be supposed that we are ascribing too much importance to the department of the mediaeval mania under examination; but, for our part, we ‘scorn nothing’ that presents a bar, however slight, to the progress of civilisation and refinement.  Pre-Raphaelitism is only one form of a degradation of taste which appears to keep pace with the utilities of the time, and we shall never be slow in lending our aid to cleanse the temple of its desecrators.  L.R.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] See the Moyen Age of Du Sommirard.

[2] Pre-Raphaelitism. By the author of Modern Painters.

A LEGEND OF AMEN-CORNER.

About the time that every prince in Europe was sending a special embassy to London, to congratulate James I. on his book against witchcraft, which none of them ever professed to have read, a strange occurrence happened in an ancient house, situated in the Amen-Corner of Paternoster Row.  Like most of the houses of old London, its lower half was brick, and its upper, English oak.  It had been built in the time of the first Tudor, but, being still a substantial tenement, was purchased some ten years before the period of this narrative, by two brothers named Christopher and Hubert, who carried on their business there.  They were of English blood, but had been born in Germany, their grandfather having fled thither in Queen Mary’s day under strong suspicion of owning a Coverdale Bible; and in the good city of Augsburg his son and grandsons had been brought up to his own craft, then known as the singular art and mystery of printing.  A separate and a thinly-scattered guild was that of the printer in those days.  Their craft had nothing in common with the world’s older arts, excepting those of the scribe and the scholar.  The entire book-trade, now divided into so many branches, was in their hands—­binder, engraver, printer and publisher, being generally the same person; and this, together with the laborious precision required in working the primitive press, made them throughout Christendom a sort of caste who