CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Fine Arts Quarterly Review, No.5 (Chapman and Hull), is thin, very thin in quality. The author of the article on G. Dore, the greatest of book- illustrators, has not succeeded in making it as interesting as the knowledge we already possess of the artist and the landscape woodcuts that accom- pany the article would have led us to expect. But the publishers of Cassell's "Don Quixote" with Dore's illustrations will think it not ill- timed. A review of "The Life of W. Blake," by Gilchrist, rebukes that author sharply and not unreasonably for his affected and disjointed style, but in censuring him for partiality in refusing to draw the inevitable conclusions from the evidence which, be it remembered, he him- self supplies of Blake's insanity, the writer appears to undervalue the in- „estimable value to a biographer of enthusiastio admiration for his subject. Nevertheless the review is a fair and temperate statement of the ease as seen from the sober common-sense side. There is an article on the "Year's Art-Exhibitions in London,” which, notwithstanding an assumption of unusual knowledge and with an exceptional love of the grotesque, fol- lows in the main the general estimate of the works exhibited ; and Part L of a "Memoir of Eugene Delacroix," the great French colourist, recalling the times when French art-students, romanticist and classicist, ranged themselves in two hostile camps, and enforced admiration of their respective masters at the rapier's point. The dis- covery is announced of a new and innocuous method of picture-clean- ing, but without one hint of the nature of the process. And there is the usual jumble called "Fine Arta' Record," which probably does not pretend to be readable, and which is too inefficiently indexed to be otherwise useful.
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