OLD LAMPS FOR NEW ONES.

THE Magician in "Aladdin" may possibly
have neglected the study of men, for the study
of alchemical books; but it is certain that in
spite of his profession he was no conjuror.
He knew nothing of human nature, or the
everlasting set of the current of human
affairs. If, when he fraudulently sought to
obtain possession of the wonderful Lamp, and
went up and down, disguised, before the
flying-palace, crying New Lamps for Old
ones, he had reversed his cry, and made it
Old Lamps for New ones, he would have been
so far before his time as to have projected
himself into the nineteenth century of our
Christian Era.

This age is so perverse, and is so very short
of faith—in consequence, as some suppose,
of there having been a run on that bank for
a few generations—that a parallel and beautiful
idea, generally known among the ignorant
as the Young England hallucination, unhappily
expired before it could run alone, to the
great grief of a small but a very select circle
of mourners. There is something so fascinating,
to a mind capable of any serious reflection,
in the notion of ignoring all that has
been done for the happiness and elevation of
mankind during three or four centuries of
slow and dearly-bought amelioration, that we
have always thought it would tend soundly
to the improvement of the general public, if
any tangible symbol, any outward and visible
sign, expressive of that admirable conception,
could be held up before them. We are happy
to have found such a sign at last; and although
it would make a very indifferent sign, indeed,
in the Licensed Victualling sense of the
word, and would probably be rejected with
contempt and horror by any Christian publican,
it has our warmest philosophical appreciation.

In the fifteenth century, a certain feeble
lamp of art arose in the Italian town of
Urbino. This poor light, Raphael Sanzio by
name, better known to a few miserably
mistaken wretches in these later days, as
Raphael (another burned at the same time,
called Titian), was fed with a preposterous
idea of Beauty—with a ridiculous power of
etherealising, and exalting to the very
Heaven of Heavens, what was most sublime
and lovely in the expression of the human
face divine on Earth—with the truly contemptible
conceit of finding in poor humanity the
fallen likeness of the angels of GOD, and
raising it up again to their pure spiritual
condition. This very fantastic whim effected
a low revolution in Art, in this wise, that
Beauty came to be regarded as one of its
indispensable elements. In this very poor
delusion, Artists have continued until this
present nineteenth century, when it was
reserved for some bold aspirants to "put
it down."

The Pre-Raphael Brotherhood, Ladies and
Gentlemen, is the dread Tribunal which is
to set this matter right. Walk up, walk up;
and here, conspicuous on the wall of the
Royal Academy of Art in England, in the
eighty-second year of their annual exhibition,
you shall see what this new Holy Brotherhood,
this terrible Police that is to disperse
all Post-Raphael offenders, has "been and
done!"

You come—in this Royal Academy
Exhibition, which is familiar with the works of
WILKIE, COLLINS, ETTY, EASTLAKE, LESLIE,
MACLISE, TURNER, STANFIELD, LANDSEER,
ROBERTS, DANBY, CRESWICK, LEE, WEBSTER,
HERBERT, DYCE, COPE, and others who would
have been renowned as great masters in any
age or country—you come, in this place, to the
contemplation of a Holy Family. You will
have the goodness to discharge from your
minds all Post-Raphael ideas, all religious
aspirations, all elevating thoughts; all tender,
awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or
beautiful associations; and to prepare
yourselves, as befits such a subject—Pre-Raphaelly
considered—for the lowest depths of what is
mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting.

You behold the interior of a carpenter's
shop. In the foreground of that carpenter's
shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering,
red-headed boy, in a bed-gown; who appears
to have received a poke in the hand, from
the stick of another boy with whom he
has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and
to be holding it up for the contemplation of
a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness,
that (supposing it were possible for any
human creature to exist for a moment with
that dislocated throat) she would stand out
from the rest of the company as a Monster, in