pring Garden. Garrick, Kean, Kemble, Booth, Vandenhoff, Cooke, Macready,
Rachel, and Mrs. Siddons, visit us from time to time.

Among our distinguished actors are many who on earth were clergymen,
politicians, and of other occupations.[A]

[Footnote A: I am told that the Rev. Newland Maffit is at present a
distinguished actor in the spirit world. ED.]

GILBERT STUART.

_ART CONVERSATION_.

People are fools in religion, and worship as divine the most stupid
monstrosities ever conceived of! Only tell the masses that St. Luke, St.
John, or Mary Magdalen was the author of some absurdity, which, if you or
I had originated, they would scoff at, and they will clasp their hands in
mute admiration over that miracle of art!

So it seems to me to be with Spiritualists. Drawings devoid of taste,
hard, and out of proportion, are received by them with acclamations of
joy, and credited, if they are figures, to Raphael, and if landscapes, to
Claude Lorraine or some other great master of art.

Now I, for one, wish people would use their brains, and not be so easily
gulled.

It is truly wonderful that a spirit can make a person draw a straight
line who never could draw any but a crooked one. It partakes something of
the miraculous, I admit; and that spirits should produce likenesses, and
representations of flowers, scrolls, and ornamental designs, and
unearthly landscapes, through mediums whose powers of representation and
artistic talents have never been developed, is indeed marvellous! but
that these drawings should be called works of art, and looked upon as the
genuine offspring of those immortal painters, is ridiculous, and a thing
to be deprecated by every intelligent spirit and Spiritualist, either
here or in any other world!

Why, God Almighty himself could not take a raw, unschooled, undisciplined
hand, and produce a work of art!

If a medium is content with what he has done, if he does not comprehend
the faults of his work, if his eye and brain are not educated
artistically,--then he must stand like a machine working in a groove.

Neither Phidias nor any of his descendants could inspire a high
production through such means!

Now I do wish that _educated artists_ would seek to be controlled by us
spirits; or that those mediums whom we do influence would go to school,
and submit to the drudgery that is necessary to give them skill in design
and execution.

Then could we hope to represent something of the p