Exhibition of Sculpture at the Royal Academy, in which are three really
fine works of art--Mr. Leighton's Man Struggling with a Snake, which may
be thought worthy of being looked on side by side with the Laocoon of the
Vatican, and Lord Ronald Gower's two statues, one of a dying French
Guardsman at the Battle of Waterloo, the other of Marie Antoinette being
led to execution with bound hands, Queenlike and noble to the last.

The collection of water-colours is mediocre; there is a good effect of
Mr. Poynter's, the east wind seen from a high cliff sweeping down on the
sea like the black wings of some god; and some charming pictures of Fairy
Land by Mr. Richard Doyle, which would make good illustrations for one of
Mr. Allingham's Fairy-Poems, but the tout-ensemble is poor.

Taking a general view of the works exhibited here, we see that this dull
land of England, with its short summer, its dreary rains and fogs, its
mining districts and factories, and vile deification of machinery, has
yet produced very great masters of art, men with a subtle sense and love
of what is beautiful, original, and noble in imagination.

Nor are the art-treasures of this country at all exhausted by this
Exhibition; there are very many great pictures by living artists hidden
away in different places, which those of us who are yet boys have never
seen, and which our elders must wish to see again.

Holman Hunt has done better work than the Afterglow in Egypt; neither
Millais, Leighton, nor Poynter has sent any of the pictures on which his
fame rests; neither Burne-Jones nor Watts shows us here all the glories
of his art; and the name of that strange genius who wrote the Vision of
Love revealed in Sleep, and the names of Dante Rossetti and of the
Marchioness of Waterford, cannot be found in the catalogue. And so it is