class in the community, and the population which produced them was not in any degree benefited, that is, raised to a higher physical or moral condition, by their own labour. This is the great and essential difference between slave labour and free labour. The slave labourer may be, and no doubt very often is, as well fed, clothed, and taken care of, as the free labourer. The American slave owner, the old West Indian planter, the Russian noble tell us so, and many travellers confirm their account. But the labour of the slave does not tend to raise his condition. It carries no improvement in it upon his moral state. His physical state, even when it is equal in comfort and well-being to that of the free labourer, is not the fruit of his own labour. His civilisation is not advanced by his industry. The public works, theatres, and works even of utility, and the agriculture itself of the Romans, appear to have been all carried on for the gratification and use of a small master-class by the animal power of men working in slavery and suffering in slavery. The saving of labour an object which has led to the perfection of labour in all the useful arts in our state of society was no object in their state of society. All was done by slaves, and great multitudes of them at command, and by overseers or freed men entertained about the families of the great. Any thing may be produced, if waste of time, labour, human life, and happiness, be left out of the estimate of the cost of production. But this is not civilisation, although a country may be filled by it with temples, arches, statues, and amphitheatres. There is this radical difference between the civilisation of the fine arts and the civilisation of the useful arts the taste for the fine arts is gratified by the simple recipience of the senses. The individual is quiescent in receiving his gratification. The taste is principally a gift of nature connected with the organisation of the individual, cultivated with little trouble, and to be enjoyed in slavery or in freedom. No exertion of his is required to enable him to enjoy fine music,

fine paintings, fine statuary, and no benefit to others is involved in his enjoyment. But the taste for the products of the useful arts can only be gratified in freedom, and by free exertion, mental and bodily, of the individual in a free social state. Industry, forethought, and social co-operation, besides the free use of property, are all necessary to enable the individual to gratify, or even form his taste for the useful arts, even in their most simple applications, as in his clothing, lodging, furniture.

The importance of the fine arts as humanising influences in society has been much overrated. Such objects and tastes as belong to the fine arts are necessarily confined to the highest ranks of the community. No other class of society was thought of by scholars at the revival of literature and of a knowledge of the fine arts. It was the public, it was the sole patron of intellectual merit, and what influenced or gratified this small class, which scarcely extended beyond the court-circle of the monarch, was raised to exaggerated importance, and made a standard for all excellence; and the prejudice continues to this day. But in reality the great mass of society, the most moral, influential, and intellectual, and in every sense the most civilised portion of it in Europe, the middle classes, never, generally speaking, saw an object of the fine arts in their lives, have no taste for any of the fine arts unless as these may be connected with their trades and occupations. Unless the fine arts are carried on as useful arts, that is, as trades repaying free independent industry, they neither add to nor denote civilisation in a community; and then they add to it less than the useful arts, because from their nature they employ less industry. They depend entirely on the individual, on his single talent, or genius, or execution alone; the useful arts on the co-operation of many individuals. Music, painting, statuary, and architecture as far as it is a fine art distinct from masonry, employ but the head and hand of the one artist. If the humanising influences of the fine and the useful arts may be measured by the civilisation of

those who cultivate them, the professors of the fine arts stand, as a class in society, below, in morality and intelligence, the class of manufactures or merchants engaged in the production or circulation of the objects of the useful arts. If the comparative influence on civilisation of the fine and the useful arts be measured by the state of society most favourable to their development, we find it is only under despotic governments that the money, labour, and time of the community can be concentrated, and commanded into the production of objects of the fine arts; and it is under free government only, and the security of property and its wide diffusion in society, that the useful arts prosper.

The amount of independent industry in a country, that is, of the free labour, bodily or mental, which the labourer exchanges for his own gratifications, physical and moral, seems to be the true measure of its civilisation; and not its temples, palaces, statues, pictures, music. Can Bavaria be compared to Scotland in the enjoyments of civilised life by all the community, although the country is drained and squeezed to produce the frippery in the fine arts which adorns Munich? The ancient Romans, as a people, have enjoyed little of this independent industry, as the mass of the working producing population was in slavery. They wanted those objects of the acquired tastes which both give employment to and are the gratifications of industry in modern society. Annihilate in Europe as gratifications generally diffused, and as incentives to industry, the use of silk, cotton, linen, and shoe-leather for ordinary clothing materials, the use of sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, distilled liquors, spiceries, and our ten thousand other modern stimulants or condiments for the gratification of the palate, the use of glass for the eyes, of steam and all machinery for the hands, of books, sciences, knowledge, religion for the mind, and leave only bread, wine, oil, and wool, as the main materials on which industry is employed, slave labour as the means of production, and triumphal arches, temples, amphitheatres, statues,

public games, and spectacles of gladiators killing each other, and of wild beasts tearing to pieces slaves - as the intellectual gratifications and we get probably pretty near to a just idea of the civilisation of the mass of the people of ancient Rome in the most flourishing period of the fine arts.

CHAP. XX.

THE POPE'S BENEDICTION. VATICAN OF LIBRARY. TOMB CLEMENT XIII.-HORSES OF MONTE CAVALLO.- ANCIENT AND MODERN SCULPTURE.

THE pope's benediction of the people, from a balcony on the outside of St. Peter's, is a fine sight. Troops, body-guards, yeomen in red and yellow clothing of the costume of Henry VIII.'s time, splendid equipages, gaudily dressed servants, ladies, officers of all countries, monks, priests in great variety and contrast of habiliments, a moving mass of uniforms, feathers, and lace, and an assemblage of 30,000 people not wedged into a tight, immovable heap, but undulating in the vast area in front of St. Peter's, form a very fine sight - very fine to talk about afterwards - but, to say the truth, a little tedious to wait upon. Sight-seeing is the traveller's dull duty.

The illumination of the cupola of St. Peter's, which took place the same evening, is also a fine sight — and is really a magnificent effort of art. The outline of the dome, the ribs, belts, windows, and all that would be drawn with the pencil in an outline sketch, are first illuminated in the early part of the evening with a steady but not brilliant light. This is the finest effect in the scene. The cupola looks like some vast thing suspended from the heavens. The lines of light give its form, and all between them is in utter darkness. the first stroke of eight o'clock the lights start instantaneously into brilliancy, and all is brightness and dazzle. They have changed in figure as well as in splendour, and now form belts of diamond-shaped forms round the dome. This magically quick change -done while the first three strokes of eight are striking -is effected by a number of exercised people, one to every fifty lights,

On