CURRENT LITERATURE.
of Allan Cunningham, and a number of foot-notes, correcting or modifying his original text. Perhaps the best praise we can give to the memoir is the expression of a wish that it had been longer, while of the notes we may say that they would have been more valuable bad they been more numerous and more systematically distributed.. Some points in the memoirs needing correction have been over- looked; we ask, in a few cases at leaat, for more recent and juster estimates of the artistic position and merits of the painters ; and we should be glad to have had lists of the best and most accessible works of the several artists. Moreover, no biography of an artist can be reckoned complete which does not catalogue the beet engravings.
from his works, and give the prices which some typical ex- amples of his powers have fetched at successive sales. Much valuable information of this sort might have been added to each of Cunningham's memoirs, without tampering with the text, or adding more than a score or so of pages to each volume.
But after all, we cannot but be pleased to welcome anew istme of those lively biographies by Cunningham, and to read again his sympathetic accounts of the early trials and difficulties, thacharacteristics, the suc- cesses, and the closing days of many distinguished painters, it is true, as Mrs. Heaton remarks, that it says much for Cunningham's artistic insight, that he should have written in terms of appreciative praise of such an artist as William Blake, for Cunningham thus anticipated the verdict which the deeper and loss conventional thought of the present day has passed upon the work of this erratic but powerful genius.
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