14 AUGUST 1875, Page 21

CURRENT LITERATURE.

The Portfolio, August. (Seeleys.)—This is an unusually good number. The frontispiece is an etching by M. A. Brunet-Debaines, after Turner's" Post Rnysdael," one of the happiest and most attractive efforts of that artist's later days. It is a capital subject for the etcher's art, more than can be said for most of the pictures of that period, which, indeed, losing colour, have not very mach left ; and it is excellently done, as regards both the sea and the very characteristic atmosphere. An interesting notice of M. Alphonse Legros follows, from the pen of M. Rend Mdnard, illustrated by a capital specimen of photogravure after a . work of the artist, "Le Chandronnier." The old man, working away at his tinkering under a group of trees, is a very striking figure. M. Legros is an artist of whose birth France may be proud, but who has found employment and appreciation in England. The literary element in this number is unusually strong. Mr. J. Comyns Carr contributes a notice of the character and genius of the late Frederic Walker, a really distributive and valuable piece of criticism. It is illustrated with two or three specimens of genuine but slight humour, the best of which is the one in which Mr. Walker represents himself as fishing with hopeless perseverance on a perfectly calm and therefore perfectly impracticable piece of water. The last article is the first part of an account of an eccentric Belgian, M. Antoine Joseph Wiorz, and comes from the pen of Mr. J. Beavington Atkinson.