CURRENT LITERATURE.
There is an air of dullness this month about the three leading illustrated magazines,—the Magazine of Art, the Art Journal, and the English Illustrated Magazine, due chiefly to there being no con- spicuous article in any one of them. In the first, Mr. Walter Crane's paper on "The Language of Line," Mr. Penderel-Brodharat's (the second of a series) on "The Forest of Fontainebleau," and Mr. John Forbes Robertson's on "The City Art Gallery of Manchester," are the beat, and that less on account of style than of the information which they supply in a condensed form. The frontispiece—an engraving of Mr. Luke Fildes's "Venetians "—is, indeed, the feature of the Magazine of Art for this month ; as is an engraving of Mr. J. S. Sargent's "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," of the Art Journal. Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson gives a sufficiently readable and appreciative notice of the career and work of this artist. Of the other contents of the Art Journal, we may single out "Landscape in America" (which is most admirably illustrated), and "The Nun's Town by the Water," for a word of commendation. The place of honour in the English Illustrated Magazine is very properly given to " Penshurst," the first of a series of "Glimpses of Old English Homes," by Miss Elizabeth Balch. The portraits, the originals of which are at Penshuret, and which include Queen Elizabeth, Philip and Algernon .Sydney, are very good. Miss Balch's letterpress, however, reminds one in style of the late Mr. G. P. R. James. Mr. Walter Armstrong's essay on "The English Art" gives an excuse for reproducing ore or two Turners and other old and excellent pictures, although the reader who is not a connoisseur in art will probably think the illustrations, executed by Messrs. Hugh Thomson and Herbert Railton, of Mr. Oatram Tristram's paper on '' The Brighton Road," thc feature of the magazine. Mr. H. D. Traill appears to be finding himself more at home than he was at first in the monthly roundabout paper to which he gives the name of " Et Castera ;" but Professor Minto's "The Mediation of Ralph Hardelot," of which one may now judge owing to its having passed its twentieth chapter, seems to prove only that its author, Professor Minto, has no capacity for writing readable historical fiction. The history in the later chapters has a dismally got-up look, and the story itself, as now developed, is one of the dreariest we ever read.
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