(The reader is to understand that the interlocutors in the

following conversation, though they may speak wit!, the air of elegant virtuosi or of nonchalant men of the world, are in truth only two shapeless, idiot-faced puppets. These puppets have been long in my family, and possess the strange and awful quality of assuming the character and appearance of any deceased personage at the mere will of their master. There is no necessity—nor would it be expedient—to enumerate the means or the rites by which animation is produced. It is enough that the puppets are clothed in the very flesh and habit of the dead, that they stand some nine inches high, and that once they are set upon the table and have exchanged their inanimate stare for the semblance of life, they cease entirely to be under the control of him who first rendered them quick. They cease to live as suddenly as they become animate, and the spirit of the dead with which they appear to be infused seldom works in then: for longer than the space of half an hour.

The influences which I had summoned upon the occasion with, which we are concerned were those of Mr. Charles Towneley (b. 1737, el. 1805), classicist and collector of the "Towneley marbles," at present lodged in the British Museum, and of .31r. Horace 'Walpole (b. 1717, d. 1797), afterwards Lord Orford, immortal as a virtuoso of the first order and as the author of that celebrated Gothic romance, "The Castle of Otranto." The puppets, upon receiving animation, immediately sat down upon the two little mahogany chairs I had provided for them, and began their conversation in the following terms.) WALPOLE (as he took a pinch of snuff delicately between finger and thumb): Yes, your smaller Venus is uncommonly neat. It was the base of the torso—the hem of the robe and the feet—was it not P—that were so much broken in the digging.

TOWNELEY (Towneley as he spoke crossed his knees and leant back with an air of candour): Well, the truth is I used you rather ill, Mr. Walpole. As a point of fact, they were altogether lost, and those you see were modelled from my own notion by some clever monkey of an Italian. The marble was so excellently coloured, I could not resist the whim I had to try your penetration.

WALPOLE: Fie, Mr. Towneley I Deceive a confrere ! Though I vow I'd forgive you if you'd tell me the name of that same "Italian monkey."

TOWNELEY: I'll write for it to my agent in Rome directly with the greatest pleasure. I employed the man through him pretty often. As you know, there were illustrious crowned heads, and even more illustrious triple-crowned heads, knock- ing against each other, the better to peer into that hole in the ground, once the Villa of Hadrian. I *as often obliged to take out my statues a leg at a time, vow them unrelated fragments, and put them together afterwards and in secret. I sometimes wonder I got so much as a busto. However, this piecemeal business lost Venus her feet.

WALPOLE (the puppet struck its hands lightly together): I was trying. to recollect what it was she recalled to me 1 I

have itl A very sweetly executed St. Barbara I have at Strawberry. Did you observe her in the refectory P Curved in oak—long heavy hair with a crown on her head and a tiny Gothic chapel on her outstretched hand P

TOWNELEY (indifferently) : I don't recall her distinctly; I remember there was such a figure.

WALPOLE: I had her from a church in Ghent. Really, I vow the size and the pose of the two are so like, one might almost stand them side by side as types of the Classic and the Gothic taste.

TOWNBLEY: Rather severe upon your wooden saint, Mr. Walpole! She would appear a little crude, I think. Why, my Venus is untouched except for the feet. A genuine work of the best period, a work of artl WALPOLE: Work of art? But you misunderstand me; you cannot have observed my St. Barbara. She is as much a work of art as anything in your collection. These figures of saints were executed by the finest carvers, men of great sensibility.

TOWNELEY: Come, come, Mr. Walpole! Don't let your very commendable desire for knowledge of an obscure period distort your judgment. You speak as an antiquarian, not as a man of taste ! Very interesting, no doubt, but seriously to compare her to my Venus ! to call her a work of art! No, no! you cannot claim that.

WALPOLE: But, Sir, I can and I do. (Here Mr. Walpole gently thumped out life points with his clouded malacca till the lace at his wrists shook.) I should no more fear a comparison of their merits than I should if we had been boys running in the field, and I had plucked a wild cowslip and you had but a great dried marigold to show. How I wish I had her here ! —much as she would lose in being brought away from her entourage of Gothic objects at Twickenham to your severe imitation of a Roman villa.

TOWNELEY: If my Venus were not so heavy that she would break the springs of the coach, I might, on the other hand, take her to Twickenham. I should not fear for her losing anything, even in the atmosphere of your—imitation—I know not what . . . Border castle is it, Mr. Walpole P WALPOLE: You may call it so if you will. (/ observed that a slightly acid ccepression had by this time overspread the countenances of both speakers. A short silence ensued.) TOWNELEY: You'll not be offended by my curiosity ...

WALPOLE (I observed he spoke with irritation): Are we not brother virtuosi, Mr. Towneley P That cancels all, I suppose.

TOWNELEY: But, frankly, what in the world induced you to plant a battlemented castle in Twickenham ? Surely the fortified style lacks the justification of convenience in case of

siege, in that neighbourhood? As for the justification of fitness, to possess that it should surely be perched on a crag in

the midst of ravines, cataracts, gorges, and tumbled rocks, not in bread-and-butter meadows. The Gothic has a rudeness, a wildness, that makes it unfit for the spot. Now an elegant colonnaded villa upon the Greek or Roman model had been far more in keeping with the scene.

WALPOLE: My dear Sir, do endeavour to disabuse yourself of the idea that the art of Gothic architecture consists in rudeness. It don't ! Have you never visited the abbey church that lies so close to your doors? (Ithink it probable that the puppets believed themselves to be in Mr. Totoneley's house, No. 7 Park Street, Westminster, known as the "Towneley Museum," and now 14 Queen Anne's (late.) The Gothic is, lam convinced, far superior even to the buildings of the ancients in richness and grandeur of effect, and it possesses a sense of mystery' and imaginative awe which they lacked entirely. Consider one of our great Gothic cathedrals! Without, pinnacle and buttress, fretted to the most graceful, aspiring motion ; within, long imposing aisles and rich clustered pillars, bathed in solemn light from some jewelled rose-window.

TOWNELEY: The Classics dared to be simple.

WALPOLE The Gothics—what is far more hazardous—to be ornate. You ask why I did not build a classic house? My

dear Sir, I bad grown heartily tired of your colonnaded villa, with its eternal orders and unvarying proportions, before I was breeched! I think that by the side of my refectories, galleries, armouries, and cloisters, with their mysterious leaded lattices, and sudden transitions from the light to the gloomy, your villa might seem a little tame.

TOWNELEY: Tamer than the scenery of Twickenham P But that aside, my villa might be thought to exceed your . . . rich

and mysterious erection, at any rate, in the qualities of restraint and good taste.

WALPOLE: "Restraint"! Ah, Mr. Towneley, there you have the name of the barren Muse to whose wintry charms the whole of Classic art became enslaved.

TOWNELEY : She was a better mistress than Licence.

WALPOLE: My dear Sir, to have a style at once varied, adventurous, and contrasting no more entails licence than restraint and dullness entail good taste.

TOWNELEY (gravely): Stay, my dear Mr.Walpole ! Consider, for heaven's sake, whither this style of argument is leading your convictions ! (He rose and began to pace up and down.) Restraint, Temperance, and Reticence must always be the three foundations of Art. They are the three watchers by the gate, the three austere guardians of the temple. They are to Art what Self-denial, Charity, and Humility are to Religion. Her very essence is discrimination, re- jection, and selection, from among the images of the mind or from the variety of natural objects . . . to speak of an art without restraint is like speaking of steel which has never seen the fire. Naturally. Art may possess restraint in a greater degree or a less; this difference in degree you seem to be confusing with a difference in kind—and Jove alone knows to what lawless wilderness the chimera is leading you. Be warned, and pursue your error no further, for you will certainly find in the end that Restraint and Selection are but other names for Art.

WALPOLE (I saw that he had flushed a little): Fair and softly, Sir ! There, indeed, speaks the infallible Church ! W.B.—Towneley was a Roman Catholic.) I do under- stand to some extent what I am talking about, believe me. No, no! our differences spring from the fundamental opposition of our views. Hear my creed . . . no ! to be per- fectly candid, not my creed neither, but the ideal after which I strive ; for I confess that what you would call the "Classic attitude," in which, like you, I was bred, is not, after all, quite so easily shaken off. But it's the creed of the future, of that I am convinced.... (He was here lost in thought a moment.) St's so much a fundamental, language almost passes over it; but I hold, as it were, that art flowers in the divine prompting of the genius—the dwanon. It was wealth of fancy, the overpowering awe of creation, the deep compelling flood of inspiration, that gave us King Lear, or built York Minster, and inspired my dear Gray, not adherence to forma or proportions. The essence of Art is to be adventurous, mysterious, and lofty. Restraints and conventions (I mean such things as the dramatic unities and the five orders) are shackles upon her wings, or at best fine leaky vessels to hold inspiration. (Leaky enough, heaven knows . . I mean we often find the inspira- tion run away and the gorgeous form remaining.) Art unin- spired is like a corpse, and I had rather the body were underground out of my sight. In short, let Art use her wings. Let her, in aspiring, lose sight of the earth rather than stay too near it to be fretted with restraints. Let her be too fantastic rather than too concrete, let her exchange all the restraint and temperance in the world for one divine drop of Inspiration.

TOWNELEY (sneering): You have painted me a tenth Muse, Mr. Walpole, but she looks more a frenzied Bacchanal beside ray grave-eyed nine.

WALPOLE (annoyed): No; like a tall pine upon a crag daring the tempest, beside a trumpery clipped palm in a hot- house,—if we are to match similes.

TOWNELNY : More like a. . . (he stopped)—bnt that we will not do or we shall grow warm. I speak for myself. Though I have a good deal more to say, I had better refrain ;—I think your ideas childish and ill-considered. I dare say you think mine illiberal and sterile. Let us leave it while we are both pretty comfortable. We seem, alas! to have nothing in common in the field to which we have each devoted our lives, and as neither can ever convert the other to his way of think- ing, it is useless to pursue the subject. Pray let us talk of something else.

WALPOLE: No, you're right, Mr. Towneley ; it gives an opportunity to the vulgar if virtuosi fall out. (Sniffing.) But what a vision you conjure up—I turned Classicist and obliged to live on at Strawberry ! But seriously (he spoke with an elegant whimsicality), though we cannot agree upon—the

forbidden topic—I believe we have one thing in common—a " Ruling Passion," too.

TOWNSLEY: Oh no! our taste is too dissimilar, believe me.

WALroLE: I maintain that it is identical—(or we'd not have been so near to calling each other scoundrel and charlatan). You yourself confess that we have both devoted our lives to the same object—the Arts. Their furtherance is what each has more at heart than anything else on earth. One goal is the same—indeed, I would go further . . .

TOWNELEY (in a tone of still slightly rid/Zeal baster): If toward me you must put down that Gothic chapel—that, like your saint, you hold for ever in your hand.

WALPOLE (he rose as if to take leave): Have mercy and let me conclude ; for I vow I must leave you to join any coach that has been waiting for me beside the park this hoar. Seriously, I think it a very good thing in the interest of the arts that an extreme spirit of Classicism should exist, profoundly as I disagree with all its con- clusions!. The Gothie will certainly ran into some extrava- gances when it becomes more popular and more assured, and if there is no Classic spirit to counterbalance it, it is likely to ant its own throat with self-sufficiency. Upon the other band, if your Classic fury reduces your art, to the dry ashes of "Restraint" . . .

TownELny (interrupting with a laugh): Mr. Walpole, I believe you are as much a trimming Whig as your father! But your detestable doctrine is too cold for me. I refuse to be converted to seeing any reasonable use either in you or in your Castle of Otranto at Twickenham.

WALPOLE: You break our compact ! Not another word about Strawberry or I shall fall to abusing your Clytie, and then there will be nothing for it but. to call Me out. Good- night, Mr. Tovrneley, and a thousand thanks for—.

(Here the life suddenly ebbed front both puppaS. Per an instant a ghastly expression overspread their Jams. Tie tremor passed, and they became again shapeless, is animate &Us.)