ion, after a time falling behind the doctor, who
was riding along the coast. Finally, it stopped, then moved off some
rods and stopped again. The same authority declares that he had been
told by a gentleman living near the sea that it had often been so
bright as to "illuminate considerably the walls of his room through
the windows." This happened only when the light was within half a mile
from the shore, for it was "often seen blazing at six or seven miles'
distance, and strangers supposed it to be a vessel on fire."

M.H.

NOTES.

It is not very extraordinary that printers' ink is a poor pigment for
painting sunsets or sunrises. The strange thing is that travelers and
sentimentalizers obstinately ignore the fact, and hang their paper
walls with more scenery of that description than any other. What a
gallery of alpine, arctic and marine sunsets we have, and how blank an
impression do they all produce! From any of them, done with a clever
pen by one who undertakes to describe what he has freshly seen, we
gather that the spectacle must have been very fine, and must have
deeply delighted the spectator. We can even catch some tints here
and there, but they are fugitive, and each escapes the eye before it
grasps the next one. If we shut our eyes on Tennyson's page we may
realize a glimpse of Mont Blanc blushing through "a thousand shadowy
penciled valleys," and have a momentary pleasure; but the poet's
picture does not abide with us. Some one devotes a couple of pages
to mapping out the infinitude of half-tints that composed a summer's
evening view looking seaward from the North Cape--a good subject
faithfully gone into, but still not a satisfactory sketch even of the
reality. The pen and type will outline and shade, but cannot color.
They give us some fair landscapes made up of form and effect; they can
compass a cavernous bit of Rembrandt, a curtain of fog or shower, or
a staircase of wood and rock climbing into the distance, just as they
can sometimes faintly depict the infinite chiaroscuro of the Miserere
in St. Peter's; but the monochrome, in music as in painting, is their
limit.

* * * * *

Has photography dealt hardly with portrait-painting as a branch of
art, or has it benefited it by weeding out the feeble? The Memorial
Exhibition will assist in determining. It will, we hope, allow the
best living painters in this department to be fully represented by the
side of their pre